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TABLE OF STRATIFIED ROCKS, WITH TYPICAL 
FOSSILS 



Irish Elk 




Mastodon 



1. Univalve (Cerithtum) 

2. Conifer (Sequoia) 

Nummulite 
Univalve (Natica) 

1. Pearl Mussel (Inoceramtis) 

2. Ammonite, new form {Turrilites) 

3. Bivalve (Pecten) 
Ammonite, new form {Hamitcs) 

Bivalve (Pholadomya) 
Bivalve (Trigonia) 

Cycad (Maiitcllla) 
Univalve (Nerinaa) 

Fish-lizard (Iclitliyosaur) 
Ammonite. 
Sea-lily (Encrinits) 
Footprints of Labyrinthodon. 

1. Bivalve (Bakezi'ellia) 

2. Lampshell (Productus) 
Ganoid {Palcconiscus) 
Precursors of Ammonites 

(Gonialite) 
2. CluTj-moss (Lepidodendron) 
Horsetail Plants (Calamite) 

Ganoid Fish (Ptericlitliys) 



Lampshells 
Tribolite 



Stropliomcna 
Lingula 
Pentamerus 
Calymene 



Seaweed (Oldliamia) 



Eozoon Canadense (?) 



Primary or Paleozoic and Kozoic: i. Archaean; 2. Cambrian; 3. Silu- 
rian; 4. Devonian; 5. Carboniferous; 6. Permian. 
Secondary or Mesozoic: 7. Triassic; 8. Jurassic or Oolitic; 9. Cretaceous. 
Tertiary or C'ainozoic: 10. Eocene; 11. Miocene; 12. Pliocene. 
Quaternary: 13. Recent. 



God^s Two Books 

Or Plain Facts About Evolu- 
tion, Geology, and the Bible 



By George McCready Price 

Professor of Geology and Physics, College of Medical Evangelists, 
Loma Linda, California; author of " Outlines ot Modem 
Science and Modern Christianity, " " Illogical Geology, " etc. 



"Singulare remedium antidotumque exhibet 
Philosophia contra infidelitatem et errores. 
Nam Slavator noster inquit, ' Erratis nescien- 
tes Scripturas et Potentiam Dei ' Ubi duos 
It'bros, ne in errores incidamus, proponit nobis 
evolvtndos : pnmo, Volumen Scripturarum, 
qu£e voluntatem Dei. dein, Volumen Creatu- 
rarum, quae poten'iam revelant. " — Tiacoit, 
"T)e Augment. Scient.," lib. i, torn, iv, p. 40. 



1911 
Review and Herald Publishing Association 

Washington, D. C. 
South Bend, Ind. New York City 



^^ 



:^^.ri^ 



Copyright, 1911, by 

Review and Herald Publishing Association 

Washington, D. C. 



CI.A280787 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 


page 


1. 


Introduction . 


9 


II. 


Moral and Social Aspects of the 






Evolution Theory . 


26 


III. 


The Evidence of Archeology 


39 


IV. 


Darwinism 


55 


V. 


Some Geological Definitions . 


78 


VI. 


A Belated Science 


88 


VII. 


The Successive Ages . 


101 


VIII. 


Extinct Species . ... 


118 


IX. 


Leading Facts About the Rocks . 


135 


X. 


The Verdict .... 


160 


XI. 


Creation as Taught in the Two 






Books 


168 




GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

CHAPTER I 

Introduction 

IT seems high time that the church of Christ got her bear- 
ings amid the many conflicting claims put forth in the 
name of modern science. It is time that she caught the 
inspiration there is for her in the fact that all the more 
recent discoveries, and a more sane, a more truly scientific 
estimate of the older discoveries, are reaffirming, in a man- 
ner as unexpected as it is conclusive, the divine harmony 
shown in the two great revelations which the Creator has 
given us of himself. 

It is no new crisis that now confronts the church. Down 
through all the ages these great , questions regarding our 
origin, our relation to the Ruler of the universe, have con- 
tinued to force themselves on thoughtful minds; and on 
the answers given to them have been built all the great 
systems of man-made religion, from 'those of Chaldea and 
India down to the Theosophy and so called ** New 
Thought " of our day. It is a common mistake to regard 
the religions of Greece and Rome, of Egypt and Babylon, 
or those of modern India and China, as consisting merely 

(9) 



10 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



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THE GRAVE THAT SHALL NEVER BE OPENED 

This Stone tomb is in Hannover, Germany, and is a little over 
a hundred years old. It was made of large slabs of stone bound 
together by iron bands, and surmounted by a huge block weighing 
a ton and a half. On it was this inscription, " This grave is 
purchased for eternity; it shall riever he opened." But a little 
poplar seed was somehow inclosed in the mold within the tomb, 
and the power of God in the little germ caused it to grow ; a slen- 
der shoot found a crevice between two of the great stones, and 
its hidden power in the tender plant broke the iron bands asun- 
der, and moved every stone from its original position. The tree 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



11 



of forms and ceremonies and idol-worship. This both the 
ancient and modern systems may have been, or may be, 
to a large class of their unthinking devotees. But in their 
beginnings, and to all their more intelligent followers, they 
were much more than this. Rather should it be said that 
all of them originated as philosophical systems for explain- 
ing the phenomena 
of nature, the ori- 
gin of things, and 
man's relationship 
to the universe. 
The forms and 
ceremonies of 
worship came in 
only incidentally 
and as a second- 
ary matter. There 
is abundant evi- 
dence that each 




THE SERPENT AND THE TREE OF LIFE 

Babylonian Cylinder 
" The wicked serpent," " the serpent of 
the darkness." was mentioned in Sumerian 
texts, and Mr. Boscawen has lately found 
a Babylonian fragment, forming part of 
the third .tablet in the Creation-series, in 
of these systems which the fall of man seems to be de- 

of man-made re- f.^^\^^^. ^" P^^^/? . t^"^^- ^; H Sayce, 

1 lie Higher Criticism and the Verdict 

ligion took those of the Monuments," pages loj, 104, fourth 

degenerate relics ''^'''''''^ 

of purer and more ancient forms of faith nearest at hand, 

and, after changing, and adapting them to suit its theories 

of cosmogony and philosophy, gradually incorporated and 



still lives, and waves victorious branches over the rent sepulcher, 
which man in his impotent and limited knowledge declared should 
" never be opened." The mighty power of God in a tiny plant 
that a child could have broken off for a toy whip to lash his 
wooden horse, laughs to scorn the finished work of man to shut 
out God from his own creationr 



12 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




ADOLF HARNACK (1851- ) 

A modern leader of theological thought in Germany, and fore- 
most of living church historians. 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



13 




DR. R. J. CAMPBELL (1867- ) 

Pastor of the City Temple, London, England. Author of 
New Theology," etc. 



The 



14 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

assimilated them, and thus grew into the system of religion 
as we know it. 

Nor is such a process confined to ancient history. Dur- 
ing the last half century we moderns have seen the birth 
and rapid growth of another great system of religion — 
we can call it nothing else — that of Evolution. To-day 
its leading thoughts, in opposition to the literal creation of 
the Scriptures, are nearly universal over the civilized world. 
In India and Japan the educated classes are as familiar 
with the current teachings of geology and biology as we 
are in America or Europe. The general idea that life 
has been on our globe for untold millions of years, that 
our modern forms of plants and animals have sprung by 
natural development from other older forms, and these 
again from still older ones, has become so much a part of 
the modern system of education that to many it seems the 
most self-evident thing in the world. And, after standing 
aloof from one another for some time, we have, during 
the last decade or so, witnessed the almost complete blend- 
ing of Evolution as a philosophy and current Protestant- 
ism as a religion, resulting in the " Theistic Evolution," 
" New Theology," etc., now so universally taught in the 
universities, colleges, and seminaries of the Western world, 
as well as from many Protestant pulpits. 

As already intimated, this modern instance is not by any 
means the first or only one where men have tried to solve 
these deepest questions of life, and origin, and duty, inde- 
pendent of a revelation from the only Being who really 
knows. The nations of antiquity all tried their hand at it. 
The Greeks especially filled several centuries quite full of 
speculations about the origin and make-up of the universe. 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 15 

Those of Plato and Aristotle, for example, became quite 
popular, and shaped the science and philosophic thought 



And if, mp friend, this onward, upward move- 
ment 

Has held since earth from blazing gas began. 
Explain me Tvhy this miracle of improvement 

Must stop when reaching man. 

For if 'tis easy in the opening portals 

Of science thus mans climb from slime to solve, 

'Tis quite as easy to suppose from mortals 
That angels may evolve! 

— Independent, Aug. 9, 1906. 



of many succeeding centuries. It is true we have long out- 
grown the crude scientific guesses of those days; and, like 
the Ptolemaic astronomy, which said that the earth was the 
center of the universe, and that the sun and stars all circled 
about it, we have long since consigned them to the limbo 
of literary curiosities. With them also have gone the nu- 
merous chemical and geological theories of the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries, equally contrary to the Word 
of God. 

But what assurance have the modern advocates of the 
Evolution doctrine that their now popular theory will not 
also be outgrown and discarded for something more in har- 
mony with the better-known facts of science, and more in 
harmony with the Bible? It certainly has no more inherent 
finality about it than any of the previous theories already 
mentioned. Evolution is precisely like all other cosmogonies 



16 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




GALILEO (1564-1642) 
" Eppur si muove ! " 
Up to his time the astronomers had been following blindly 
for over a thousand years the false hypothesis of Ptolemy that 
the earth is the center of the universe, and that the sun and all 
the stars revolve about it. Accumulated discoveries had made 
this theory so top-heavy with absurdities that it was a great relief 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 17 

in being an attempt to solve the riddle of the universe by 
unassisted human reason. What probability is there that 
it has succeeded at this any better than its predecessors? 
In one form or another it may be now almost universally 
accepted among scientific men, but were not the astronom- 
ical theory of Ptolemy and the philosophy of Aristotle ab- 
solutely universal for over a thousand years? 

We must not forget the long centuries during which the 
follies of alchemy were regarded as science, and the par- 
amount influence of the planets over human destiny was 
exalted into a kind of religion. Already the discoveries of 
recent years have made many of the foundation principles 
of the current geology and Evolution as hard for well-in- 
formed scientists of the twentieth century to believe as the 
"deferents" and "epicycles" of Ptolemy were to Kepler 
and Newton. How long may it be ere it will be evident 
that we have outgrown the geological absurdities about the 
successive forms of life that have peopled the globe, as we 
have the crude speculations and the infant lispings of all 
the other sciences? And who will then care for the bril- 
liant theories which entertained the people during the latter 
part of the nineteenth century? The shores of time are 
strewn with the sad wrecks of human philosophies and cos- 
mogonies, built with the greatest care by giant minds, who 
were confident that they could thread the channels of the 
great unknown without a Pilot. 

when Galileo took these facts and proved the sun to be the center 
of the solar system. Modern geology is in about the same con- 
dition that astronomy was then, and sadly needs some one to 
reconstruct it on a basis of common sense and true scientific rea- 
soning. When thus reconstructed, it will be found to be in perfect 
harmony with the Bible. 



18 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




CHARLES DARWIN (1809-1882) 

He had seen the idea develop and become recognized that the 
world had been peopled during successive ages by different sets 
of plants and animals, and that the geological changes of the past 
were of the same sort as the changes said to be now going on in 
our modern world. Surely, thought he, why not suppose that 
these early types gradually developed into those that succeeded 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 19 

It may be well right here to glance briefly at the general 
history and teachings of the Evolution theory. A more 
complete history of the doctrine and presentation of its 
teachings has been given elsewhere, but a brief outline 
seems essential here in understanding its bearings upon 
religion. 

Modern Evolution is much older and broader than Dar- 
winism. It can be readily traced back to the eighteenth 
century, perhaps further; for back of Darwin lie geology 
and the nebular hypothesis. With the latter we have noth- 
ing to do now, though it may be remarked in passing that 
it is a crude and by no means universally accepted theory 
of how our solar system may have condensed, from a great 
mass of matter scattered through space, into the sun and 
its family of planets, including the earth. But older than 
even this is geology, which by such men as Leibnitz ( 1 646- 
1716), Buffon (1707-1788), Cuvier (1769-1832), 
and William Smith (1769-1839), was gradually gaining 
the confidence of many educated men in asserting that the 
world had been peopled for untold ages by successive 
assemblages of plants and animals, until, at a comparatively 
" modern " date, man was created and placed upon it. 

The next stage in the development of the theory came 
when Lyell, about 1830, began teaching the quietistic 
theory; viz., that all the successive geological changes could 

them ? The modern world has grown tired of his pet theory of 
" Natural Selection " for explaining how this development was 
brought about, for no such gradual change of one species into an- 
other has ever yet been proved. But almost all modern scientists 
still cling to the doctrine of Descent or development somehow, 
though " Darwinism " is expressly repudiated by many of them, 
and there is little agreement among them as to how this develop- 
ment was brought about. 



20 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




THOMAS H. HUXLEY 

One of the most clear and fascinating writers that ever handled 
the English language. To this fact, as well as to his manifest 
candor and honesty, we must attribute in large measure the quick 
success attained by the doctrine of Darwinism. He was the 
victim of too much faith in the unproved assumptions of geology 
as then taught, though he saw more of the illogical reasoning lying 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 21 

be understood as the result of causes similar to those now 
in every-day operation around us. That is, the geology 
of Lyell not only denied the Bible record of a universal 
world-catastrophe, the deluge, but it smoothed the way for 
regarding all the operations of Providence, even creation, 
as only similar to the commonplace things taking place 
about us every day. 

Here, then, was the whole skeleton or outline of the 
Evolution theory, needing only something to articulate to- 
gether its several parts. This was supplied by the works 
of Charles Darwin, who published his " Origin of Species " 
in 1859. His theory was only an elaboration in more de- 
tail of the general thought that each successive stage of 
the geological series was not a new creation of plants and 
animals, but that each of these new sets, appearing (as 
the geologists said) so abruptly and mysteriously, probably 
grew naturally out of the preceding. 

For scores of years those scientists who believed in these 
successive " ages " of geology had felt the necessity of 
some such explanation of this mysterious phenomenon, but 
had hitherto failed to find any plausible theory to fit the 
case. But now Darwin's theory of natural selection sup- 
plied the long- felt want; and, assisted by the brilliant plead- 
ing of such men as Huxley, Spencer, Haeckel, and Tyndall, 
the world declared the chain of evidence complete. The 
result has been this strange phenomenon of practically the 
whole educational world receiving this flimsy tissue of 
guesses as the proved facts of science, and either abandon- 

at the basis of the science than any man of his time. Spencer 
wrote nearly as strongly in criticism of " Illogical Geology," but 
was more pedantic and less bewitching in his literary style, and 
far less open to the claims of religion. 



22 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

ing all their religious hopes, as in the philosophy of Spencer 
and Haeckel, or else changing and adapting their religious 
views in such a way as to harmonize with this idea, as in 
the system of such men as Lyman Abbott, Le Conte, or 
Huxley; for, considered from the standpoint of old-fash- 
ioned Christianity, there is no material difference between 
the modern Theistic Evolution and the agnosticism of T. H. 
Huxley. 

The sad results to the church of accepting the Evolution 
doctrine are thus vividly set forth by the New York Inde- 
pendent of June 24, 1909: — 

When we found that the world was more than six thou- 
sand years old, that there was no universal flood four 
thousand years ago, that Adam was not made directly from 
dust, and Eve from his rib, and that the tower ' of Babel 
was not the occasion of the diversification of languages, we 
had gone too far to stop. The process of criticism had 
to go on from Genesis to Revelation, with no fear of the 
curse at the end of the last chapter. It could not stop with 
Moses and Isaiah; it had to include Matthew and John 
and Paul. Every one of them had to be sifted; they had 
already ceased to be taken as unquestioned, final authorities, 
for plenary inspiration had followed verbal inspiration just 
as soon as the first chapter of Genesis had ceased to be taken 
as true history. The miracles of Jesus had to be tested as 
well as those of Elijah. The date and purpose of the 
Gospel of John had to be investigated historically as well 
as that of the prophecy of Isaiah; and the conclusion of his- 
torical criticism had to be accepted with no regard to the 
old theologies. We have just reached this condition, and 
there is repeated evidence that it makes an epoch, a revolu- 
tion, in theologic thought. . . . To this present teaching, 
which has invaded all our denominations, Jesus is the 
world's prime teacher, but it can assert nothing more. There 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 23 

is, it declares, no reasonable proof of his birth from a virgin, 
no certainty of a physical resurrection; the Gospels must 
be analyzed, for they contain mythical elements, non-his- 
torical miracles, unverified assertions. . . . 

But this doubt, even this questioning or denial, changes 
the old, evangelistic theology. It questions or denies the 
Trinity, the resurrection, the sacrifice of the cross, even all 
miracles, and it undermines all authority of inspiration or 
even revelation, and sends us back to human reason, with 
such divine guidance as may be allowed; the authority of 
the Bible and the authority of the church both to be vali- 
dated only by human reason. 

There is really no half-way position possible for the 
church of to-day. At the beginning of the nineteenth cen- 



f ■■-■ 



/ k^orv nothing about the origin of man except 
what I am told in the Scripture, — that God 
created him. I do not know anything more than 
that, and I do not know an^hod]) who does. I 
would say with Lord Kelvin, " There is nothing 
in science that reaches the origin of anything at 
all.'' — Sir William Dawson. 



tury, when the species found by the geologists in the rocks 
were all supposed to be extinct species and different from 
the forms now alive on the earth, many well-meaning 
church people admitted the " ages " of geology, but assigned 
them to a period long anterior to the present creation. But 
as the living species of sea-shells, fishes, insects, mammals, 
and plants became better known, and the identity of the 
living with the fossil forms was proved in case after case. 



24 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

the church people began to say that the " days " of crea- 
tion mentioned in Genesis were immense periods of time, 
corresponding to some of the successive " ages " of the 
geologists. Hugh Miller, Dawson, and others, were the 
means of making this explanation quite popular for many 
years. But while a trace of similarity may thus be made 
out for the two, no reputable scientist could now be found 
who would admit anything more than a fancied resemblance 
between these days of Genesis and the " ages " of the 
geologists; so that the scientist and the theologians alike 
admit that the Mosaic record can not thus be made to 
harmonize with the results of modern geology, and they 
have long since given up the attempt to do so, concluding 
that the first chapters of Genesis are only a myth, or at the 
most a beautiful poem. 

But why should we not draw courage from the very 
universality of the false views regarding creation now pre- 
vailing? God will not, he can not, allow this situation 
to continue. My faith in the Bible compels me to believe 
that God must soon vindicate before the world the harmony 
of his two books, just as he vindicated the Bible in the 
days of the Reformation. In those days a blasphemous 
church claimed a power superior to the written Word; 
the Bible was vindicated, and given its rightful place as 
the guide of the church. To-day a skeptical world has 
arrayed God's two books against each other, and men jus- 
tify themselves in rejecting the one because they say it does 
not agree with the other. Other reforms have been based 
on various parts of the Bible here and there; the one now 
due is based on the first part of the Bible. Hence, with 
the cloud under which this part of the Bible now rests in 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 25 

the minds of most people, the logic of the situation de- 
mands that God shall vindicate his record of the flood and 
of creation in a marvelous way before this generation. His 
two books must be shown to agree, so that the world may 
be left without excuse. 

The present volume is at least an honest effort to indi- 
cate the lines that this vindication must take, and to show 
some of the inspiring lessons already deciphered from God's 
larger book of nature confirmatory of his written Word. 
It does not profess to be complete; but at least it indicates 
the direction in which the most returns are to be looked 
for in connection with this field of study. There have been 
scientific commotions and revolutions in the past; but when 
the world once awakens to the meaning of the modern dis- 
coveries, an outline^of which is given in the following pages, 
there must follow a return to old-fashioned Bible Chris- 
tianity such as the world has not seen since the Reforma- 
tion of the sixteenth century. Nothing is settled until it is 
settled aright; and the only way in which these matters 
can be settled is by showing the absolute harmony between 
the book of nature and God's written Word. 



CHAPTER II 

Moral and Social Aspects of the 
Evolution Theory ' 

IT is rightly considered that the supreme test of any doc- 
trine, religious, social, or scientific, is its bearing upon life 
and human action. " Ye shall know them by their fruits." 
Accordingly we may ask. What are the fruits or the nat- 
ural results of the Evolution theory? The brief outline 
of the moral and social consequences of the theory given 
in the following pages may serve to show the implacable 
conflict there is between this theory and the teachings of 
Christianity. The arguments on this point may be con- 
veniently grouped under three heads : — 

(a) Evolution denies man's moral responsibility for the 
sin and misery of our world. 

(b) It denies, or seeks to render useless, the gospel rem- 
edy for this state of things. 

(c) Its logical and practical results in every-day life 
are producing social and civil evil effects, which threaten 
the foundations of civil and religious Hberty. 

These three divisions of the argument must now be con- 
sidered in order: — 

(a) The basic principles of the moral and religious 
consciousness of man lead us to the concept of the Author 
of the universe as at once all-powerful, all-wise, and all- 
good or just — in complete harmony with the Creator re- 
vealed in the Christian's Bible. However, on looking at 

^ For a more detailed statement of the arguments used in this chapter see the author's 
" Outlines of Modern Science and Modern Christianity," chapters 8 and 9. 

(2G) 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 27 

ourselves, or the world around us, we see a strange con- 
flict with these ideal principles. Sin and misery abound on 
every hand. As Shelley beautifully expresses it, — 

** All my knowledge is that joy is gone. 
And this thing woe crept in among our hearts. 
There to remain." 

This universal experience of misery and consciousness 
of sin is also in complete harmony with the Bible; for one 
of the most fundamental ideas contained in the latter is 
that man has sinned, and is not now in harmony with his 
Creator. Take this general thought out of the Bible, and 
what is there left? 

Now there are but three possible suppositions regarding 
the evil and misery of our present world : — 

1. The Creator may have made us out of hand in our 
present condition of misery and evil. 

2. Or he may have produced our race by development 
from ruder and still lower conditions, and we be now on 
the road to a yet higher plane of development. 

3. Or God may have created man " very good," *' up- 
right," in perfect harmony with the highest moral ideals, 
but man may have lost the blessing and happiness neces- 
sarily conditioned on such a state, by violating fundamental 
moral law; just as a perfectly healthy man (if we can 
conceive of such a being) might lose his health by violating 
physical law. 

The first of the above-mentioned suppositions is evidently 
not within the limits of discussion; for it charges with pur- 
poseless folly an evidently (on other grounds) wise Cre- 
ator, if he deliberately made a being out of harmony with 
his own fundamental character. 



28 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

The second, however, demands our very closest attention, 
for it is the real Evolution doctrine regarding the origin of 
man and his moral nature. Every scheme of Evolution 
(and there are some) which endeavors to explain man's 
physical frame and moral nature otherwise than by gradual 
development out of savage and bestial antecedents, is so 
far inconsistent with itself and with the general principles 
of the doctrine, that we may ignore it altogether. Le 
Conte has well expressed the moral teachings of the Evo- 
lution theory, as follows: — 

*' What we call evil is not a unique phenomenon con- 
fined to man," and is not in any way whatever connected 
with man's free will as an intelligent being rebelling against 
his Creator. It " must be a great fact pervading all nature, 
and a part of its very constitution," the present conditions 
being but the outworking of principles implanted in nature 
long ages before man's existence. (" Evolution and Re- 
ligious Thought," page 365.) 

But where is there any essential difference between this 
idea and the first supposition, which we have already re- 
jected? For it makes misery, evil, and sin the endowment 
of the Creator, just the same, something which he imparted 
to the universe when he started it evolving. It pushes the 
origin of evil further back in time, but it ends in either 
making evil the deliberate endowment of the Creator, be- 
queathed to his universe at its beginning, or else assumes 
that he was conditioned and hampered by the material on 
which he was working. Some ingenious acrobat in logic 
may endeavor to dodge these conclusions, but there is really 
no alternative for the consistent Evolutionist. 

On the one hand, we can not believe that an all-wise 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 29 

and all-good Creator would deliberately make himself re- 
sponsible for such a state of things, by implanting evil ten- 
dencies in his creatures, and then punishing them, even by 
the law of cause and effect, for living out the dictates of 
their hereditary natures. On the other hand, we may well 
refuse to discuss any pantheistic scheme which so identifies 
the Creator with the materials of his universe as to make 
him in any way hampered or conditioned by such material ; 
or which, in other words, makes evil a something inherent 
in the nature of the universe, something for which God 
himself is not responsible, and which he could not eliminate. 

We may indeed safely ignore any philosophy which 
would make the Creator anything else than all-wise, and 
non-conditioned by any possible contingency. But with this 
granted, we must admit that the principles which such a 
Being has put into his works must be an expression of his 
character. 

The *' tooth-and-claw " phase of nature, and especially 
the depraved, evil condition of human nature — '* here 
where men sit and hear each other groan," — must in some 
way express the character of our Designer, unless some free, 
conscious intelligence (such as man himself) has marred 
God's work and perverted the natural endowment of his 
creatures. If retaliation for injuries received, if pride and 
lust, are perfectly natural to the human heart, as we must 
all sadly confess they are, they must in some recondite man- 
ner express the character of our Creator, if he made us 
as we are, or on any lower or more undeveloped plane of 
being out of which these characters have naturally sprung; 
and therefore these things can not be really evil; they can 
not be immoral. 



30 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

Let us be plain. Moral duties, in the broadest sense 
of the word " moral," are such as inhere in the relationship 
between the creature and his Creator. No other basis for 
morality can be found. Hence, if our Creator has endowed 
any of us with certain instincts and propensities, our moral 
duty to him obliges us not to repress and subdue, but to 
exercise and develop, these instincts and propensities to their 
utmost possible extent. It would be immoral to do other- 
wise — " sinful," if you please. Hence, the hatred, lust, 
and pride so natural to the human heart are in no sense 
wrong or punishable if they represent a natural endowment 
given us by our Creator, no matter through what process 
he formed us. 

But every one knows that these instincts and passions 
bring misery and ruin alike to the subjects and objects of 
their force. Misery and woe are the inevitable results of 
their exercise. Hence we can go further and say that a 
being who would thus punish his creatures, even by the law 
of cause and effect, for doing as he taught them or endowed 
them, would be all that we understand by the word *' fiend." 
But such is the god of the Evolutionist, and there is no 
way of evading this issue. 

There is no need of saying that there must be something 
wrong with a notion of man's origin that leads to such a 
frightful conclusion. And surely the moral issue, as set 
forth above, is a surer way of gauging the truth or falsity 
of the Evolution theory than the long, complicated methods 
connected with " variation " and " selection," " heredity " 
and " environment," and the other biological problems, even 
supposing the theory apparently capable of the most exact 
proof. In short, we need offer no apology for thus meas- 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 31 

uring this scientific hypothesis by other and far more certain 
standards of truth. 

(b) Having now shown that the Evolution doctrine de- 
nies man's responsibihty for the sin and misery of our world, 
we must consider the second of the arguments with which 
we began this chapter; viz., that it also denies, or seeks to 
render useless, the gospel remedy for this state of things. 

Our Lord's mission, as expressed by himself, was to 
" seek and to save that which was lost," not merely those 
who were lost, '* that which was lost," — ■ the world and all 
it contains. But where is the loss if man has been con- 
tinually progressing from a crude beginning? If Evolution 
be true, our race has known only gain. And a thousand- 
fold more progress must have been made previously, from 
the bestial condition up to the civilization of the Roman 
empire, when Christ spoke these words, than the race has 
ever made since. And surely in that case the principles of 
progression themselves would secure the ultimate redemp- 
tion and perfection of the race without the intervention of 
a divine Mediator, and the death of a divine Sacrifice. 
Surely the Evolution theory converts into a gigantic farce 
the old, old story of the cross, and makes the whole Scrip- 
ture a jargon of unmeaning folly. 

" For God so loved the world, that he gave his only- 
begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not 
perish, but have everlasting life." The amazing sacrifice 
required to effect a remedy for the horrible condition called 
sin is an everlasting protest against the idea that man could 
be developed or educated out of it in any other way. Like 
oil and water, the two systems will never mix. The Evo- 
lution theory is the modern scientific way of a man's being 



32 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

his own savior; the Christian rehgion points us to " the 
Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." 

(c) One more count against the theory remains to be 
noted in this chapter, for we have also asserted that its 
practical outworkings are threatening the very foundations 
of civil and religious liberty. 

Those who have watched the general trend of civilized 
society during the last half century or so can not shake off 
the terrible foreboding that creeps over them as they watch 
the grim, red Terror loading its pistol and sharpening its 
dirk while awaiting the opportune time to strike. States- 
men feel as sure of the inevitable result as of to-morrow's 
dawn; their efforts are all of a nature to postpone as long 
as possible the inevitable crash, praying and hoping that 



Nothing is more abhorrent to a reasonable man 
than an appeal to a majority^; for it consists of a 
few strong men xvho lead, of f^naves who tempo- 
rize^ of the feeble who are hangers-on, and of the 
multitude who follow without the slightest idea 
of what they want. — GoETHE. 



the deluge may not come in their day. And the generally 
accepted doctrine that all progress, whether in the individual 
or the race, is to be reached only by a ceaseless struggle 
for existence and survival at the expense of others, has 
certainly stimulated to an intense degree the popular unrest 
and discontent of the present day.^ On every side we see 
it intensifying as never before the ingrained selfishness of 

2 See Sir WUliam Dawson's " Modem Ideas of Evolution." (1890.) 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 33 

human nature, and, in every pursuit of life, embittering the 
sad struggle for place and power. Perhaps above any 
other one cause the ethics of this doctrine has been the 
chief means of firing the blood and quickening the pace 
of the present strenuous age, until the only apparent out- 
come will be the wreck and anarchy of Revolution, all 
the more hopeless and horrible this time because it will be 
universal over the globe, conterminous with the bounds of 
civilization. 

Thus far all are comparatively agreed. Among the va- 
rious conflicting remedies for these tendencies we can dis- 
tinguish two that accord well with the theory we are 
discussing, and which are, in fact, the outgrowth of the 
universal belief in the doctrine of Evolution: — 

1 . The subordinating of every minor interest to the su- 
preme idea of corporate progress, the progress of the state 
or the progress of the world. This involves the curtailing 
of individualism wherever it conflicts with the fancied ne- 
cessities of the whole. 

2. Ecclesiastical blending or co-operation in securing 
results desired by the leading religionists. 

It is not alone the Peace Congress delegates who are 
working for the " parliament of man, the federation of the 
world," or for the republic of the world, as it is variously 
expressed. Consciously or unconsciously, every public- 
ownership man, every Socialist, every imperialist, every trust 
magnate, is contributing something to the swelling cry of 
those enthusiastic but deluded voices that are now seeking 
to carry out over the whole world what has been re-enacted 
over and over again all down through the years whenever 
a community or a nation found themselves unable to gov- 

3 



34 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




CARDINAL GIBBONS 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 35 

em themselves, and with hurrahs and clapping of hands 
invited a Caesar or a local chieftain to assume the task. 
The dismal failure to accomplish the object sought, which 
has so inevitably followed with mathematical precision in 
the past, seems not in any way to abate the zeal of the 
political enthusiasts of the present, for few have ever read 
history to any profit. But the point to be especially noted 
here is that practically every Socialist, every imperialist or 
world federationist, bases his whole argument ultimately 
on the evolutionary progress of the race or the world. 

The other panacea for the many evils of our time is 
also the logical outgrowth of the Evolution doctrine in the 
minds of those chiefly concerned with moral and ecclesi- 
astical matters. During all the ages the Roman Catholic 
Church has advocated, and wherever possible has prac- 
tised, the enforcement of the teachings and worship of the 
church. But the whole Protestant world has for many 
decades been possessed of the dream of the speedy triumph 
of religion over all forms of evil. Not seeing the progress 
desired in this direction, and having denied and discarded 
the " supernatural " part of religion, they seem to be plan- 
ning for an organized raid on all unrighteousness, to hasten 
on the speedy triumph of religion. Would it not be for 
the greatest good to the greatest number? Why should 
the commercial and industrial trusts secure all the benefit 
resulting from this new system of organized and combined 
effort? 

For many years these things have been discussed by 
the pulpit and the press, with the greater number of all the 
real efforts of the church for the good of the world devoted 
more to the salvation of the state than of the individual, 



36 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




ARCHBISHOP IRELAND 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 37 

till the contagion of this trust fever has quickened their 
pulses, and in the " Federal Council of the Churches of 
Christ in America " we already see a very important step 
taken in the direction of at least a federal union of all the 
" orthodox " churches for the enforcement of those things 
that are held by them in common. But in the light of 
the history of the first centuries, when a similar work was 
carried on and developed into the Catholic Church, with 
the enforcement of its regulations by civil law, what can 
be expected from a similar work in our day but a revival 
of that curse of all the ages save our own, religion by law? 

And it is not at all difficult to trace it all largely to the 
scientific and philosophic teachings of the day; for it is the 
younger men, those educated in an atmosphere of Evolution 
and " Higher Criticism," and accustomed from youth to 
sneers about the " nursery yarns " of Genesis, who are 
leading out along these lines. In the Dark Ages, when the 
Bible was shut away from the people, their ignorance of its 
truths resulted in crime and lawlessness on every side, and 
in their having no protection against their civil and eccle- 
siastical oppressors. To-day, the destruction of faith in the 
Bible by this false science is accomplishing the same results 
as the destruction of the Bible itself. On every hand we 
see iniquity abounding, and the people with no care for, or 
knowledge of, their danger from the religio-political com- 
binations now forging the chains for their enslavement. 

A world-wide organization or combination for the sal- 
vation of society as a mass, which must result in a religio- 
political despotism, is the logical outcome of the Evolution 
theory; its triumph is only a question of time; and its 
strength and universality when established can be estimated 



38 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

only by the popularity of the teaching which for a half 
century has been preparing the world for just such a state 
of things, by teaching that the struggle for existence is the 
normal and not an abnormal condition of society; that man 
has developed from the lowest beginnings through this pro- 
cess, and can therefore complete the work of self-regenera- 
tion and purification without any outside *' supernatural " 
help, or " restitution of all things." ^ 

3 See B. F. Trueblood, "The Federation of the World; " R. L. Bridgman, " World 
Organization;" and other publications issued through the American Peace Society, 3) 
Beacon Street, Boston. 



CHAPTER III 

The Evidence of Archeology 

THUS far we have been reasoning from the known to the 
unknown; from the more perfectly to the less per- 
fectly understood. We have tested the Evolution theory by 
comparison with standards of truth concerning the value of 
which every Christian is perfectly assured, standards infi- 
nitely more certain than any conclusions arrived at by the 
gropings of the unaided human thought. We have seen 
that the theory of man's having been made through a long 
series of developing germs, mollusks, quadrupeds, and sav- 
ages, up to his present state, is not only contrary to the 
express statements of the Bible regarding creation, but, if 
true, would make the Creator a tyrant and a fiend, and is 
thus contrary to the whole tone and spirit of Christianity 
from Genesis to Revelation; and that, furthermore, its gen- 
eral acceptance is preparing the way, as nothing else could 
ever have done, for a religio-political despotism crushing 
out individual freedom of thought. 

The arguments in favor of organic Evolution are con- 
fessedly very obscure and intricate; and now, having tested 
the general trend of the doctrine by other and far more 
certain standards of truth, we have found it wanting on at 
least three distinct counts. 

But this much being now settled, and the theory having 
been found to be somehow a terrible delusion, we must 
next seek to find out just how and where the mistake has 
been made; just how the scientific mind has been tricked 

(39) 



40 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

and its reason beguiled into believing it; for we can not 
think that men like Mivart, Fiske, Romanes, and Huxley 
were guilty of palming off upon the world what they them- 
selves knew to be only a delusion. 

Our next means of testmg the theory under examination 
must be in the field of history and archeology. If man has 
sprung from the lower forms of life up through the savage 
to the civilized condition, we ought to be able to find many 
things confirming it in the conditions revealed at the dawn 
of history. And it is really most natural thus to work 
backward upon the supposed history of development; for 
there are certainly some leading facts about man's early 
history that are many times more certain than most of the 
supposed generalizations of biology and geology. 

What, then, are the conditions revealed as the curtain 
rises on the first scenes of recorded human history? Briefly, 
and without attempting to offer, much proof for the state- 
ments made, we may say that we have well-civilized tribes 
scattered over all the continents, in Peru, Mexico, the cen- 
tral plain of North America, western Europe, Egypt, Baby- 
lonia, Assyria, and the East, each possessing a civilization 
seldom equaled, save in very modern times, and in some 
respects not excelled by any, and yet of such a character, 
and so undeniably related to one another, as to prove that 
these scattered civilizations must have had a common source 
in some other civilized state before they were thus dispersed. 
It is also very strongly suggested in many ways that this 
primal home of civilized man before his dispersion is some- 
how lost in the geological changes which have taken place. 
In addition we shall find that the history of languages con- 
firms the record of Babel; while all nations have not only 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



41 



traditions of the flood, but of an Edenic beginning; and 
at this first glimpse we get of human society, they give us 
in their social customs, and embalmed in the dry husks of 
their dead formalism 
and idolatry, gleams 
of lofty ideals and 
forms of prayer to 
one supreme God, 
the Creator, — all 
traces of a more in- 
tellectual, a more 
truly human state in 
the dim forgotten 
past, the afterglow 
of a once brighter 
day. 

We may first 
note, then, that 
about fifteen or 
twenty centuries be- 
fore the Christian 




A CHALDEAN DELUGE TABLET 

" The Babylonians divided their his- 
tory into two great periods : the one 
before, the other after, the Flood." 
(" Babel and Bible," by Frederick 
Delitzsch, page 42.) And the Baby- 
lonians had just ten " kings " before 
the Flood, just as the Bible has ten 
antediluvian patriarchs. No reputa- 
ble scholar now doubts that these ac- 
counts of the deluge represent a real 
historical fact. 



era, there were peoples possessed of a good degree of civ- 
ilization spread over practically all the northern hemisphere, 
and over some tropical countries. The monuments of Peru, 
Mexico, and Yucatan, which are the astonishment of every 
traveler, testify to this fact for the localities which they 
represent. Without giving a detailed account of these stu- 
pendous remains, we may note that there are many points 
about these peoples which connect them closely with ancient 
Egypt and the far East. 

1. The Central American architecture in many ways 
resembles that of Egypt. 



42 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



2. The Peruvians, Aztecs, and other American tribes 
embalmed their dead, as did the Egyptians and some others 
of the ancient Oriental nations. 

3. The hieroglyphic writings of the Mayas, so abundant 




Figure of a mammoth 
chiseled on the walls of 
caves in southern France. 
This great elephant must 
have been contemporane- 
ous M^ith the man who 
drew his picture 




Reindeer 





;|%-|.' 



Horse with saddle A gnu, or perhaps a l)ison 

PICTURES OLDER THAN THE FLOOD 

on the walls of their ruins in Central America, are closely 
related to those of Egypt. 

4. " It is a very remarkable fact," says Alfred Maury, 
** that we find in America traditions of the deluge coming 
infinitely nearer to that of the Bible and the Chaldean re- 
ligion than among any people of the Old World." 

5. The skeletons of the Peruvians, mound-builders, etc.. 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 43 

show a remarkable degree of what scientists call " platic- 
nemism," or flattening of the tibiae or leg bones, a striking 
peculiarity found also in many of the skeletons of western 
Europe, some of which, as we shall afterward see, are 
clearly antediluvian, and others very early postdiluvian. 

6. The races in America give us very numerous repre- 
sentations of the elephant (or the mammoth), which show 
a close resemblance to the drawings of the same animal on 
the cave walls of southern France, which certainly carry us 
back near to the time of the deluge, or perhaps beyond. 

Taken together, the above facts clearly prove: — 

(a) That the ancient American races are closely con- 
nected with the most ancient civilizations of the Old World. 

(b) That they were in a civilized state themselves be- 
fore they separated from the latter. 

(c) That this dispersion must have occurred long cen- 
turies before the Christian era, probably 

(d) Very soon after the flood — the latter being a well- 
defined event for which we shall find abundant scientific 
proof. 

If we go to the Old World, we have first the dolmens, 
or cromlechs, scattered over almost all Europe, North Af- 
rica, and parts of Asia. Some will insist that it was a rude 
state of life to which these people had attained. Certainly 
they had a hard lot, and possessed few of the comforts 
and luxuries of life. But we can not believe that these 
people who thus took such pains to construct elaborate and 
substantial tombs for their dead, involving with their rude 
implements a degree of skill and patient labor which we 
can scarcely imagine — we can not believe that these people 
were possessed of any narrow outlook on Hfe, or were of 



44 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

the happy-go-lucky type which we call savages. It is true 
they had no electric lights or morning papers, no telegraphs 
or telephones, not even brandy or cigars, all of which are, 
in the fancy of some superficial thinkers, the criteria of 
civilization. But we must own that they possessed what 
we call pluck to an unexampled degree. 

Works left by the very earliest races on all the conti- 
nents testify that these people possessed a strength of mind 
and body unequaled at the present time. Surely it required 
indomitable courage to attempt, and much patient persever- 
ance to carry out, these works, before which any modern 
race of men, I care not who, would quail utterly, and which 
they would refuse to attempt, if limited, like these their 
ancestors, to the rude implements which they could indi- 
vidually manufacture from the rocks and ores. Compared 
with the men who built the Sphinx and the Pyramids in 
Egypt, Birs Nimrud at Babylon, the temples and teocallis 
in Cambodia and Java, and the almost identical, though 
larger ones in Mexico and Central America, Stonehenge in 
England, or even the mound of Cahokia in Illinois, we 
moderns are sadly degenerate in physical and moral courage. 

We must also own that these ancient observers of nature, 
thus scattered almost contemporaneously over all the con- 
tinents, who understood all the leading principles of astron- 
omy, including the rotundity of the earth, twenty centuries 
or so before the Christian era, and who in their wonderful 
works display a mastery of all the leading principles of 
civil and mechanical engineering, were not without mental 
training, albeit they had no sumptuously bound books, and 
no morning papers delivered at their door. With no facil- 
ities to help them, they accomplished wonders; we accom- 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 45 

plish less with every facility. Have we evolved from them 
by development, or have we degenerated? 

But let us glance briefly at some of the details of one 
of these peoples, ancient Egypt. It is only one out of a 
half dozen or more, but is more familiar to us, because its 
climate, together with some other causes, has contributed 
to preserve to our times a better record of those ancient 
days. But, like that of the contemporary peoples elsewhere, 
there is no evidence that the civilization of Egypt was de- 



The Mosaic age, instead of coming at the dawn 
of ancient Oriental culture, really belongs to the 
evening of its decay. The Hebrew legislator was 
surrounded on all sides by the influences of a 
decadent civilization. — A. H. Sayce. 



veloped in that country itself, and abundant evidence to 
show that it must have been received full-grown from some 
other locality — doubtless through Babylon from the ante- 
diluvian world. 

A writer in Blackwood's Magazine thus expresses it: — 

As we have not yet discovered any trace of rude, savage 
Egypt, but have seen her in her very earliest manifestations 
already skilful, erudite, and strong, it is impossible to de- 
termine the order of her inventions. Light may be thrown 
upon her rise and progress, but our deepest researches have 
hitherto shown her to us only as the mother of a most ac- 
complished race. How they came by their knowledge is 
matter for speculation; that they possessed it is matter of 
fact. We never find them without the ability to organize 
labor, or shrinking from the very boldest efforts in digging 



46 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

canals and irrigating, in quarrying rock, in building, and in 
sculpture. 

In the words of Ernest Renan: — 

Egypt at the beginning appears mature, old, and entirely 
without mythical and heroic ages, as if the country had 
never known youth. Its civilization has no infancy, and 



That Baby^lonian laiv should have been already 
codified in the age of Abraham deprives the " crit- 
ical " theory, which maizes the Mosaic law pos- 
terior to the prophets, of one of its two main 
supports. The theory was based on two denials 
— that writing was used for literary purposes in 
the time of Moses, and that a legal code was 
possible before the period of the Jewish kmg^- 
The discovery of the Tel el-Amarna tablets dis- 
proved the first assumption; the discovery of the 
code of Khammurabi has disproved the second. 
Centuries before Moses the law had already been 
codified, and the Semitic populations had long 
been familiar with the conception of a code. The 
answer of archeology to the theories of modern 
** criticism " is complete; the law preceded the 
prophets, and did not follow them. — A. H. 
Sayce, "Monument Facts," pages 69, 70, 83. 



its art no archaic period. The civilization of the old mon- 
archy did not begin with infancy. It was already mature. 

The Egyptians were evidently a cultured people when 
they entered the Nile valley. And not the least proof of 
this culture is the moral and religious ideals they then had. 
As another author expresses it: — 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 47 

The civilization of Egypt at its first appearance was 
of a higher order than at any subsequent period of its his- 
tory, thus testifying that it drew its greatness from a foun- 
tain higher than itself. It was in its early days that Egypt 
worshiped one only God; in the latter ages this simple and 
sublime belief was buried under the corruptions of poly- 
theism. — ''Atlantis,'' page 131, by Ignatius Donnelly. 

But in this proof of a very intimate connection with those 
who handed down in unbroken hne this subhme truth from , 
the long-lost Eden, the Egyptians were not alone. Those 
marvelous books of the ancient Hindus, " embodying the 
earliest system of philosophy which we possess," reveal a 



Centuries before Abraham was born, Egypt and 
Babylonia were alike full of schools and libraries, 
of teachers and pupils, of poets and prose-writers, 
and of the literary wor^s which they had com- 
posed. — A. H. Sayce. 



similar state of affairs, as do the clay tablets of ancient 
Babylonia. 

" The religion of the Veda knows no idols," says Max 
Miiller; " the worship of idols in India is a secondary for- 
mation, a degradation of the more primitive worship of 
ideal gods." 

The following, also, from the Duke of Argyll, is to the 
point : — 

We have found in the most ancient records of the Aryan 
language proof that the indications of religious thought are 
higher, simpler, and purer as we go back in time, until at 
last, in the very oldest compositions of human speech which 



48 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




A. H. SAYCE (1846- ) 

Professor in Oxford University, England 

Probably the most accomplished living authority on the in- 
scriptions recovered from the ancient civilizations of the Orient. 
He started out in life as a " Higher Critic," but his discoveries 
in the inscriptions confirming the Old Testament records soon 
turned him face about, until perhaps no single writer has done 
so much to bring discredit upon not only the results but the 
methods of the " Critics " as this " versatile and Protean scholar." 
It is supremely amusing to see how Professor Cheyne (" Found- 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 49 

have come down to us, we find the Divine Being spoken 
of in the subHme language which forms the opening of the 
Lord's prayer. ... 

All we can see with certainty is that the earliest inven- 
tions of mankind are the most wonderful that the race has 
ever known. 

The first use of fire; the discovery of the methods by 
which it can be kindled; the domestication of wild animals; 
and, above all, the processes by which the various cereals 
[oats, wheat, barley, etc.] were first developed [?] cut 
of some wild grasses, — these are all discoveries with which, 
in ingenuity and importance, no subsequent discoveries can 
compare. They are all unknown to history — all lost in 
the light of an effulgent dawn. 

To those who have never thought much along these lines 
it may not seem that the domestication of the horse, ox, 
sheep, goat, etc., and the cultivation of the grains, is any- 
thing very wonderful. But with a little further thought it 
will be seen that we have in these arts, or discoveries, or 
whatever we choose to call them, the broad and efficient 
foundations of civilized life, without which civilization of 
any kind (in our present state of climate, etc.) is impos- 
sible. But when we put with this the very important addi- 
tional fact that civilization is always an inheritance, that in 
no single case since the dawn of history has a savage race 
ever thrown off its savagery, and developed an agricultural 
life and a civilization of and among themselves, without 
having learned it from some other people, we see the records 
of Genesis confirmed, and realize that man did not start on 

ers of Old Testament Criticism," pages 231-241) almost begs him 
to "be a good boy" and come back to them (the Critics), and 
think of the good (?) to " scientific " criticism his talents might 
accomplish by so doing. For answer the reader ought to study 
Sayce's " Monument Facts and Higher Critical Fancies." 



50 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




GOD'S TWO BOOKS 51 

this earth as a savage, but only a " little lower than the 
angels." Through luxury and loss of moral self-control, 
nations have time and again relapsed into barbarism, or 
semi-barbarism; but the moral development which must nec- 
essarily precede civiHzation has never yet been self-origi- 
nated by any people in any age. As, in biology, life can 
come only from antecedent life, so are civilization and moral 
development only received from those who already possess 
them. 

Returning now to the problem of the domestic animals 
and plants referred to in the above-quoted words of the 
Duke of Argyll, we have, we think, proof absolutely con- 
clusive that they must first have been acquired by man in 
that vastly more favorable climate and soil of the ancient 
world, before the great world-catastrophe of the deluge. 
The most common domestic food plants are not found wild 
in any spot on earth, and will not long survive without hu- 
man care in any climate or soil that we now possess. 
Where did they come from, if not from that Eden world 
before the deluge, when, as geology shows us, " the whole 
northern hemisphere enjoyed a kind of perpetual summer; " 
when palms and other tropical plants grew in England; 
and luxuriant ivies, grape-vines, oaks, walnuts, and mag- 
nolias grew in Greenland " within eleven degrees of the 
pole "? (James Geikie, " Historical Geology," page 76.) 
We confidently affirm that no other explanation is possible. 

Why is it that the origin of maize, rye, oats, barley, and 
wheat, — the plants essential to civilization, — "is totally lost 
in the mists of a vast antiquity"? Surely we must shut 
our eyes to all the evidence in the case if we deny that 
this origin, and hence the origin of civilization, is lost some- 



52 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

where in the geological changes which we know positively 
have taken place since man was upon the earth. Only by 
the dispersion of the survivors of a world-catastrophe, it 
seems to me, can we account for this simultaneous appear- 
ance in different countries of full-grown civilizations, with- 
out the slightest indication or indeed the possibility that any 
of those peoples developed it of themselves. 

Again we quote from one who felt the irresistible power 
of this argument : — 

We can not consider all these evidences of the vast antiq- 
uity of the great inventions upon which our civilization mainly 
rests, including the art of writing, which, as I have shown, 
dates back far beyond the beginning of history; we can not 
remember that the origin of all the great food-plants, such 
as wheat, oats, barley, rye, and maize, is lost in the remote 
past; and that all the domesticated animals, the horse, the 
ass, the ox, the sheep, the goat, and the hog, had been re- 
duced to subjection to man in ages long previous to written 
history, without having the conclusion forced upon us irre- 
sistibly that beyond Egypt and Greece, beyond Chaldea 
and China, there existed a mighty civilization, of which 
these states were but the broken fragments. — ** Atlantis,'' 
page 455. 

Very little more remains to be said about man's earliest 
history. Here are two facts about the history of languages 
which, taken together, are a good commentary on the rec- 
ord of Babel in Gen. 1 1 : 4-8: — 

It must be recollected that language is not merely the 
conventional instrument of thought, but, to a great extent, 
its creator, and the mold in which it is cast. The mold 
may be broken, and races abandon old and adopt new lan- 
guages by force of external circumstances, such as conquest, 
or contact with, and absorption by, superior races, but there 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 53 

is no instance of its being so transformed from within as to 
pass into a totally different type. Nor can we very well 
see how root-words once attached to fundamental' ideas, 
such, for instance, as the simpler numerals, should come to 
be forgotten, and new and totally different words invented. 
— S. Laing, ''Modern Science and Modern Thought,'' 
page 102. 



Languages, as Well as history, point bacl^Tvard 
to a lost civilization and a golden age. — NiE- 
BUHR. 



And yet this same author. Evolutionist though he is, is 
constrained to acknowledge that — 

the best authorities tell us that a list of fifty to one hun- 
dred languages could be made of which no one has been 
satisfactorily shown to be related to any other. — Id., page 
100. 

No comment on these two facts is needed here. They 
certainly confirm in a very striking way the Biblical record, 
and are in accord with the old Babylonian inscription that 
" He [God] gave a command to make strange their 
speech; " also the tablet of Nebuchadnezzar, concerning 
*' the most ancient monument of Borsippa," that '* since a 
remote time people had abandoned it, without order ex- 
pressing their words." 

We can not go into the subject of the world-wide tradi- 
tions of the deluge. This chapter is already too long, and 
our readers all know of the Chaldean deluge tablets, since 
the discovery of which no reputable scientist has denied that 



54 GOD*S TWO BOOKS 

they must represent an actual fact which had burned itself 
into the memory of all the early races of the world. In 
the words of Lenormant, " Far from being a myth, the 
Biblical deluge is a real and historical fact." Our sub- 
sequent chapters on geology will develop the evidences of 
it as a scientific fact. 

So much then for the testimony of history and archeology 
on the subject of Evolution. It is needless for us to sum 
up the matter by saying that they lend no countenance to 
this theory. Such a statement would be altogether too 
tame. Rather must we say that we could scarcely wish 
for better evidence that " God hath made man upright; 
but they have sought out many inventions." 



CHAPTER IV 

Darwinism 

WHAT is a species? An answer to this somewhat 
perplexing question is essential to a proper under- 
standing of this phase of the doctrine of Evolution. 

" A species," says Huxley, " is the smallest group to 
which distinct and invariable characters can be assigned." 
The Standard Dictionary says that the term is used for "a 



The attempt to find the transition from animal 
to man has ended in a total failure. The miss- 
ing linJ^ has not been found, and will not be found. 
Man is not descended from the ape. It has been 
proved beyond a doubt that during the past five 
thousand ^ears there has been no noticeable change 
in mankind. — ViRCHOW, IN AN ADDRESS, 
Vienna, 1902. 



classificatory group of animals or plants subordinate to a 
genus, and having members that difFer among themselves 
only in minor details of proportion and color, and are ca- 
pable of fertile interbreeding indefinitely." It also adds: 
" In the kingdoms of organic nature [plants and animals] 
species is founded on identity of form and structure, both 
external and internal, and specifically characterized by the 
power of the individuals to produce beings like themselves, 
who are also in turn productive." 

To make the matter a little more plain, we quote from 

(55) 



56 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



the late Prof. J. Le Conte, whose writings on the subject 
of Evolution have had a wide circulation: — 

There are two bases on which species may be founded. 
Species may be based on form, morphological species; or 

they may be based on repro- 
ductive functions, physiolog- 
ical species. By the one 
method a certain amount of 
difference of form, structure, 
and habit, constitute species; 
according to the other, if the 
two kinds breed freely with 
each other, and the offspring 
is indefinitely fertile, the kinds 
are called varieties; but if 
they do not, they are called 
species. — ''Evolution and Re- 
ligious Thought" page 233. 




THE DOMESTIC YAK (BoS 

grunniens) of india 

This so-called species is 
very different in appearance 
from our domestic cattle 
(Bos taurus), and yet the 
two breed freely together, 
proving that they are not 
distinct species, but only va- 
rieties. Many similar ex- 
amples might be given. 



He also adds that this lat- 
ter test, that is, whether or 
not the kinds are cross-fertile, 
*' is regarded as a most im- 
portant test of true species, as 
contrasted with varieties or races." This is a very im- 
portant point, for a great many uncandid writers on the 
subject of Evolution have tried to evade this test entirely. 
Darwinism, then, professes to show how the species now 
in existence probably originated from previous simpler spe- 
cies by processes now in operation around us, the chief one 
of which is known as *' natural selection." 

There are, indeed, many proofs that various types now 
classed as distinct species must have had a common origin. 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 57 

For instance, the yak and the zebu of India, and the bison 
which formerly inhabited the great North American plain, 
are all classed as distinct species, and, indeed, are in many 
points strikingly dissimilar from one another and from our 
common domestic oxen. And yet from the physiological 
test given above they can not really be true species, for it 
is a well-known fact that they will all breed freely together, 
those of India having been crossed with domestic cattle 
from time immemorial, while in the old colonial days of 
America the same was frequently done with the bison. 
Hence we may feel almost certain that these species at 
least, perhaps all or nearly all of the dozen or so species 
of the genus Bos, have all descended from some common 
ancestors. There are some twenty or more species of wild 
pigs scattered over the Old World, which we are assured 
by the highest authority would probably " breed freely to- 
gether." (" Mammals, Living and Extinct," pages 284, 
285.) Moreover, we know that the extremely diverse types 
of dogs, scattered in all climates, are not only perfectly cross- 
fertile among themselves, but breed freely with wolves and 
others of the canidce, so that this whole family may possibly 
represent but one original stock. Hence, a broad view of 
species would lead us to trace a real genetic relationship 
between many quite diverse types of animals, just as we 
are assured that the Negro, white, and yellow races of man- 
kind are all descended from a common stock. 

But Darwinism goes very much further than this. Let 
me state the theory as given by Le Conte: — 

According to Darwin, and all [ ? ] biologists of the pres- 



58 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




JOSEPH LE CONTE (1823-1901) 
For over thirty years Professor in the University of California 
His genial personality and charming literary style did much to 
popularize the study of geology in America, and made people for- 
get his somewhat dogmatic manner and faulty reasoning when 
advocating the Evolution doctrine. His writings have done much 
to make " Theistic Evolution " acceptable to the religious people 
everywhere. 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 59 

ent day, species are variable, without limit, if only the causes 
of change are constant and slow enough in their operation, 
and the time long enough. A species must be in harmony 
with its environment; for that is the condition of its exist- 
ence. Now, if the environment change, the species must 
tend to change slowly, from generation to generation, so 
as to readjust its relations in harmony with the changing en- 
vironment. If the change of environment be slow, the re- 
adjustment may be successful, and the species will change 
gradually into another form, so different that it will be called 
a different species, especially if the intermediate gradations 
be destroyed. If the change in the environment be too rapid, 
many species, especially the more rigid, will be destroyed, 
while the more plastic may survive by modification. Thus, 
at every step in the evolution of the organic kingdom, some 
species have died without issue, while others have saved 
themselves by changing into new forms in harmony with 
the new environment. Comparing to a growing tree, some 
branches overshadowed die, while others push on for Hght, 
forming new lateral buds, and dividing as they grow. By 
continued divergent change, species gradually become genera ; 
genera, families, etc. Thus, varieties, species, genera, fami- 
Hes, orders, classes, etc., are only different degrees of differ- 
ences formed all in the same way. Varieties are only com- 
mencing species, species commencing genera, and so on. In 
a perfect classification, varieties, species, genera, families, 
orders, classes, etc., are only different degrees of blood-kin- 
ship. — " Evolution and Religious Thought,'' pages 72, 73, 

Now in this statement of -he case we may note three 
assumptions which are contrary to both the Bible and true 
science. I give them here in outline, and shall then briefly 
discuss them somewhat. These assumptions are: — 

1. That species are variable without limit. 

2. That the time at our command, that is, the time 
since life has been on the globe, has been long enough to 



60 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




AU(.UST WEISMANN (born Jan. 17, 1834) 
Professor in the University of Freibiir":, in I'aden 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 61 

develop in this way all the countless forms of life now in 
existence. 

3. That the general tendency of unlimited variations 
through almost unlimited time would be always in an up- 
ward direction, i. e., toward a more complex development. 

Regarding the first of these assumptions, we may briefly 
say that there has not yet been a single new species, among 
either plants or animals, produced by either natural or arti- 
ficial selection, since man began to observe and experiment. 
When we say " new species," we mean new physiological 
species as defined above by Le Conte and the Standard 
Dictionary. In fact, most scientists acknowledge that, how- 
ever plastic they may imagine them to be in the abstract, 
and especially in times long past, species are now fixed 
within certain limits, beyond which we have never yet been 
able to carry any product of variation. 

Before passing on to the second and third assumptions 
mentioned above, as involved in the Darwinian argument, 
we must note briefly the great and surprising change of 
attitude on the part of the scientific world within the past 
few years. 

It started about 1887, when Weismann, Wallace, Lan- 
kester, and others began to show that changes in the indi- 
vidual brought about by environment or by use and disuse 

August Weismann's great and lasting contribution to science has 
been in showing that characteristics acquired by a parent are not 
transmitted to offspring. Hence it is hard to see how a plant or 
animal can transmit what it has not got itself, and what none of 
its ancestors ever had. His writings started the modern scientific 
civil war among biologists, with the result that " Darwinism is,, 
for scientific circles at least, at its last gasp " (Nature, Nov. 28, 
1901, pages 76, 77), and its "tombstone inscription" has already 
been written by one of the leading scientists of Germany. See 
Dr. Dennert's " At the Death-Bed of Darwinism." 



62 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

of organs, are positively not transmitted to offspring. Other 
Evolutionists, with Herbert Spencer among them, would 
not at first listen to such an idea at all, and were very 
emphatic in pointing out that natural selection alone can 
explain neither the origin of varieties, nor the first steps in 
advance toward usefulness. " An organ must be already 
useful before natural selection can take hold of it to improve 
it." It can not make a thing useful to start with, but can 
only make more useful what already exists. Until these 
developing limbs or organs were decidedly useful to the 
individual or the species, they would be only a hindrance, 
to be removed by natural selection, instead of being pre- 
served and improved. But, in this view of the case, what 
single organ of any species would there be that must not 
thus have appeared long before it was wanted? 

The elaborate discussions of these questions, which have 
been going on now for nearly a score of years, have only 
emphasized the fact that each side was right in the objec- 
tions which it urged against the general doctrine of Evolu- 
tion as presented by Darwin. The one party, clinging 
tenaciously to the Darwinian factor of natural selection, 
have shown that use and disuse do not apply to plants, while 
even among animals there are numerous examples of com- 
plicated structures which have arisen somehow, " without 
the aid of use-inheritance, nay, in spite of its utmost oppo- 
sition." (Ball's " Effects of Use and Disuse," pages 
15, 16.) The other party, though modifying considerably 
the old Lamarckian factors of use and disuse, have become 
dismayed at the prospect of having to explain Evolution 
without them, because, in the case of every organ of every 
distinct type, *' there was a time when there were no others " 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



63 



(Le Conte, "Evolution and Religious Thought," page 94), 
Herbert Spencer declaring that " either there has been in- 
heritance of acquired characters, or there has been no Evo- 
lution." Or, as it is expressed in a quotation with which 
Hugo de Vries closes his recent book, " Species and Va- 
rieties " (pages 825, 826), "Natural selection may ex- 
plain the survival of the fit- 
test, but it can not explain the 
arrival of the fittest." 

Between these two parties 
there is certainly very little 
left of Darwin's doctrine; for 
if an individual positively can 
not transmit to his posterity 
what he has acquired in his 
Hfetime, how can he transmit 
what he has not got himself, 
and what none of his ances- 
tors ever had? And if nat- 
ural selection can not start a 
single organ of a single type, 
what is the use of discussing its supposed ability to improve 
them after the machinery is all built? 

No wonder Sir William Dawson could say, m 1 89 1 , 
that " Darwinism seems to have entered on a process of 
disintegration;" or that a German author more recently 
could say that " Darwinism, for scientific circles, at least, is 
at its last gasp." (Nature, Nov. 28, 1901, pages 76, 77.) 

Still more recently we have the following summary of this 
modern scientific civil war by the veteran Von Hartmann, 
as quoted from a German magazine : — 




THE ORANG-UTAN 

(Simia satyrus) 



64 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



In the sixties pf the past century the opposition of the 
older group of savants to the Darwinian hypothesis was still 
supreme. In the seventies the new idea began to gain 
ground rapidly in all cultured countries. In the eighties, 
Darwin's influence was at its height, and exercised an al- 
most absolute control over technical research. In the nine- 
ties, for the first time, a few timid expressions of doubt 
and opposition were heard, and these gradually swelled into 
a great chorus of voices, aiming at the overthrow of the 

Darwinian theory. In the 
first decade of the twentieth 
century, it has become ap- 
parent that the days of Dar- 
winism are numbered. 

However, it is somewhat 
difficult to understand some of 
these recent sweeping con- 
demnations of Darwinism 
(many more like the above 
might be given) ; for after 
learning that a certain learned 
man has repudiated the the- 
ory, we generally find that 
he still believes in Evolution somehow — perhaps has in- 
vented a theory of his own ^ to account for what seems to 
be axiomatic in these days; viz., that in some unknown way 
the higher forms of life have been produced naturally out 
of the lower. The Hugh Millers and Dawsons are prac- 




THE GORILLA (Gorilla savagei) 



' A reviewer of Weismann's latest book objects to its title, " The Theory of Evolu- 
tion," and says that it should rather be " My Theory of Evolution." Some of the strongest 
arguments against Darwinism have been formulated by De Vries and T. H. Morgan who 
have substituted the theory of the " survival of definite variations." We see nothing to object 
to in the general argument of these writers, that new types "are born, not made by Dar- 
winian methods," save that their much-tallced-of new species have not yet gotten across the 
pons astnorum of the physiological tr st; for, though quite different in appearance, they are 
yet perfectly cross-fertile with their genetic relatives. 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 65 

tically all dead. But why is this? Why will intelligent, 
educated men, many of them undoubtedly lovers of the 
Bible, thus cling to some intricate, unproved, and unprov- 
able theory of the origin of organic forms, contrary to all 
known facts? 

There can be but one answer. It lies in the second 
of the assumptions in the quotation from Le Conte previously 
mentioned — an assumption which all moderns take as an 
axiomatic fact. They all believe in geology as currently 
taught; they take for granted that geology has demonstrated 
that life has been on our globe for millions of years, and 
that there has been a succession of life here from the low 
to the high; and they think some form of connected, genetic 
development more reasonable than separate, successive cre- 
ations, on the instalment plan. Darwin could never have 
found a half dozen schoolboys to listen to him, if the Gei- 
kies and Dana, Lyell and Hutton, Smith and Cuvier, had 
not for several generations got the educated public to accept 
as science the absurd pretensions of their geology. 

But before touching on this second of the assumptions 
of Darwinism about geological time, we wish to say a few 
brief words regarding the third; viz., that the general re- 
sults of variation must tend always in an upward direction. 
On the contrary, all our experience tends to show that 
degeneration has marked the history of every living form 
since their ancestors were embalmed in the rocks at the time 
of the deluge. Or, even considered abstractly, the variations 
induced or perpetuated by an unsuitable environment, such 
as of food, climate, etc., must inevitably tend toward the 
degeneration of every organic type thus affected. Natural 
selection, or the survival of the fittest, may tend to delay or 



56 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




HERBERT SPENCER 



He spent a lifetime endeavoring to build up a " Synthetic Phi- 
losophy " of the universe, in which the evolution of man from the 
lower animals is one of the incidents. It had a certain vogue 
while he lived, but like Haeckel's works, it is rapidly losing its 
popularity, and will lome day " be relegated to the lumlier-room 
of science," if it is not there already. See Dennert's " At the 
Death-bed of Darwinism," pages 24. 25. 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 67 

partly to neutralize this tendency of a hard environment to 
bring about degeneration of the type, but the invariable ten- 
dency of an unfavorable environment in either plants or 
animals is not to develop, but to degrade.^ 

Coming back now to the subject of geological time, we 
must content ourselves in this chapter with an effort to make 
plain the connection and logical relation between geology 
and Evolution. The merits of the former as a science, 
and the facts of the true geology — for there must be a 
true science of the rocks — we shall discuss in the sub- 
sequent chapters. Our object here is to show that without 
the baseless assumptions of geology there could not possibly 
be any theory of Evolution. Science would, as never be- 
fore in the history of our race, stand face to face with the 
sublime yet awful fact of creation by the direct act of 
the infinite God. For what is the use of talking about the 
origin of species if geology can not prove that there has 
actually been a succession and general progress in the life 
upon the globe? What if no single fossil form can be 
proved to be intrinsically older than any other form, or than 
man himself, and thus these buried plants and animals be 
only the classification series in the life of the antediluvian 
world? Is it worth while talking about the development 
of superior types by natural selection during the paltry few 
thousand years thus available? Or, even granting unlimited 
time, by ignoring the Biblical record, what sort of scheme 
of Evolution can we construct, if geology can not furnish 
us ready-made the succession of life from the low to the 
high, as the skeleton or framework on which to build it? 
No one would dream of attempting such a feat. 

2 See the author's "Outlines of Modem Science and Modem Christianity," pages 
213 - 220, Also the recently issued Catholic Encyclopedia, article, " Evolution." 



68 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




A. G. WERNER (1749-1817) 

The most picturesque personality in the early days of modern 
science. By his enthusiastic teaching he gathered as students, and 
sent out as evangelists, a devoted army of disciples who " were 
as certain of the origin and sequence of the rocks as if they had 
been present at the formation of the earth's crust" (Geikie) ; 
and for many years as they traveled over Europe and America, 
they always seemed to find the rocks Tminerals) in the same 
relative order as Werner had shown them in Saxony. Poor 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 69 

Remembering, then, that the geological succession of Hfe 
is merely the framework or skeleton of the Evolution 
theory, but utterly without a shred of evidence in its support, 
as we shall prove later, and that, from the Biblical stand- 
point, this same succession of life-forms from the low to 
the high is just the taxonomic or classification series in the 
life of the antediluvian world, we begin to see about how 
the case stands. If geology has not the most absolute proof 
that the fossils have really occurred in a definite chronolog- 
ical order, then we may well smile at the curious feat in 
logic of attempting to bring in this geological succession as 
evidence in favor of Darwinism. Surely some strange 
things passed for scientific proof during the past century. 

To those who are accustomed to clear thinking in history, 
law, religion, literature, mathematics, etc., it becomes a real 
intellectual amusement to trace the utterly unscientific way 
in which this life-succession idea has been built up.^ The 
earlier geologists, Werner, for example, found the rocks 
occurring in a certain order in a few localities in Germany, 
and forthwith drew the astonishing conclusion that they 
must occur in this definite order all over the world, and 
really encircled the earth, like onion coats, in successive 
layers. It was the granites, limesiones, sandstones, etc., that 
were thus arranged in chronological order. But in some 

^ See the author's " Illogical Geology," chapter 2. 

Werner had never been outside the narrow confines of his own 
native country, and he died in ignorance of the thousands of sub- 
sequent discoveries that have made his " Neptunism " and his 
onion-coats the laughing-stock of modern science. Perhaps it was 
fortunate for him and for the world that he never could be in- 
duced to put his theories in writing. The three little green peas 
in the little green pod had more data for supposing the universe to 
be green than he had for telling how the world was made. 



70 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




WILLIAM SMITH (1769-1839) 

Called the " father of geology." He was a land surveyor who 
conceived the idea that the rocks could be traced out over Eng- 
land by the fossils they contain, and that these rocks always 
succeeded one another in the same relative order. He knew noth- 
ing of the rest of the world, and never professed that these fossils 
iiuist always occur in this particular order all over the world, niujh 



GOD*S TWO BOOKS 71 

of these limestones, sandstones, and loose soils. Smith and 
Cuvier found certain fossils occurring in the different strata, 
and they jumped to an equally amazing generalization, that 
the fossils must always occur in this definite order all over 
the world. Werner's onion-coat hypothesis was still re- 
tained; though, instead of having successive ages of lime- 
stone making, sandstone making, etc., they had ages of 
fishes, of reptiles, of mammals, etc. For Werner's idea 
that only certain kinds of limestone (or whatever) were 
to be found next to the primitive or Archaean, the geologists 
now substituted the notion that only certain kinds of fossils 
were thus situated. As this crude idea was also gradually 
refuted by investigation, and it was found that any kind of 
rock (fossil) whatever may occur next to the Archaean, 
geologists failed to reconstruct their theories to accord with 
this new fact, but clung to the order of succession already 
outlined, involving now the equally absurd notion that while 
one type of life, say trilobites, were living and dying in one 
locality, another and very diverse kind of life, say numulites, 
could not have been living and dying in another locality 
on the other side of the globe. Even to-day the science has 
not yet outgrown the childish nonsense of this last alternative. 
But another astonishing trick of logic must now be men- 
less that they represented a real order of creation. But Werner's 
onion-coats Vv^ere becoming discredited somewhat, and so geologists 
were eager to find some better way of distinguishing the various 
rocks than by their mineral or mechanical make-up ; and this 
new idea of Smith's seemed so simple and useful that it was 
eagerly adopted in England. And as the great Cuvier was at this 
very time teaching the same thing in France, it was not long be- 
fore their onion-coats of fossils were substituted for the mineral 
onion-coats of Werner. This absurd notion is still the great 
incubus on modern geology, and has furnished all the basis there 
ever has been for the doctrine of Evolution. 



72 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




GEORGES CUVIER (1769-1832) 

In geology his name is chiefly associated with the doctrine of 
Catastrophism, in which he taught that the world has experienced 
a great many successive creations and complete destructions or 
catastrophes. By his scholarly work in comparative anatomy and 
zoology he had made himself the greatest scientist of his age, so 



GOD^S TWO BOOKS 7Z 

• tioned; for, of course, the whole geological succession has 
never been found in any one locality; only a very small 
fraction have ever been found together in any given vertical 
section of strata. In piecing together samples from distant 
localities, Agassiz and others adopted as a guiding test the 
modern embryonic life of the individual, and arranged the 
details and the exact order in which the members of any 
given group must have appeared, by comparison with this 
embryonic development. Now, in our own days, the Evo- 
lutionists, led by Haeckel and Spencer, prove their theory 
of Evolution by showing that the modern embryonic life 
of the individual is only " a brief recapitulation, as it were 
from memory," of the geological succession in time, and 
have berated the Bible for half a century because it did 
not agree with such a method of scientific research. 

Now, with '* Darwinism at its last gasp," and its days 
" numbered," and with even the mirage of geology, its sup- 
posed foundation, fading from our vision, it is surely with 
renewed courage and faith that we turn to the dear old 
Book which has told the one story all these years. They 
only are truly scientific who take God's written Word as 
the key in studying his larger book of nature. How appro- 
priate that, at such an intellectual and religious crisis as 
this, the Lord should send a special message to the world 



that when he began to write on geology and described the exact 

order of these successive creations and destructions, his word be- 
came law for nearly half a century. Instead of the mineral onion- 
coats of Werner, he substituted onion-coats of fossils, and the 
world has blindly followed this absurd idea for nearly a century. 
His doctrine of Catastrophism went into oblivion under the teach- 
ings of Lyell and the other uniformitarians, but his successive 
ages of advancing forms of life have been carefully nursed and 
joined together into the modern doctrine of Evolution. 



74 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




SIR CHARLES LYELL (1797-1875) 

Lyell came on the stage when the world was getting tired of 
the waste of energy involved in Cuvier's theory of Catastrophism. 
He collected much data regarding the work that the elements are 
continually doing in our modern world, following out the same 
line of thought as Hutton had given to the world some forty years 
before. He taught that the present action of the elements is the 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 75 

about his created works: " Fear God, and give glory to 
him; for the hour of his judgment is come; and worship 
him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the foun- 
tains of waters." Rev. 14:7. And, above all, how ap- 
propriate that the Creator is now giving anew to the world 
his Sabbath as the souvenir, or reminder, of a creation 
brought about, not on the instalment plan, as the geologists 
have taught, but in six literal days, — a reminder also of 
his power to re-create or redeem us from sin and its con- 



sequences 



same as the world has always experienced. This theory, known 
as Uniformitarianism, or the quietistic theory, has held the science 
o£ geology in bondage for over half a century, and only a few of 
the more advanced thinkers yet realize that it is childishly inade- 
quate to explain the awful vicissitudes recorded in the rocks. He 
died in 1875, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Had it not 
been for such men as Cuvier and Lyell, the modern teachers of 
Evolution, Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley, would never have been 
listened to for half an hour. 



76 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




The Macmillan Co., London 

LOUIS AGASSIZ (1807-1873) 
Using the then recently discovered embryonic development of 
typical fishes and other animals for his models, he arranged the 
fossils from scattered localities so as to resemble this modern 
embryonic development; and to-day such men as Haeckel and 
Spencer take the results of this artificial arrangement, with all its 
curiously inconsequential reasoning, as the strongest proof (?) of 
their theory of Evolution. 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



77 




PROF. ERNST HAECKEL (born Feb. i6, 1834) 
Professor of Zoology at Jena 
His " Riddle of the Universe " and other works have had a 
wide circulation in English and German, even throughout Japan 
and India, though he is not nearly so popular as he once was. 
His favorite line of argument is the famous " biogenetic principle," 
previously stated by Von Baer, Agassiz, and Fritz Miiller, by which 



CHAPTER V 

Some Geological Definitions 

HAVING now seen that Evolution has its stronghold in 
geology, that, in fact, geology furnishes practically 
all of its supposed foundation, we must next undertake an 
investigation of this much-misunderstood branch of science. 
To prepare our non-scientific readers to understand the dis- 
cussions which are to follow, v/e must here explain some 
of the more common terms and expressions. 

Geology is the science of the rocks. The term *' rock " 
is used in this science — 

to denote any naturally-formed mass of mineral matter, 
whether it be hard or soft, compact or loose. Hence, blown 

it is claimed that the modern embryonic development of the in- 
dividual is a brief recapitulation, as it were from memory, of the 
geological succession in time ; and on this " principle " he has con- 
structed family trees of descent for man and all the other forms 
of life. But it is amazing that modern scientific literature should 
so long be burdened with such vicious reasoning, for this so- 
called " biogenetic principle " is only reversing the way in which 
the geological succession itself was manufactured ; for we must 
never forget that the geological succession is wholly an artificial 
thing, and has no foundation whatever in actual fact. Agassiz 
and the other early geologists arranged the details and the exact 
order of their (alleged) successive life-forms by comparison with 
the embryonic development of the modern individual, and now 
Haeckel and Spencer have tricked the world into believing they 
can " prove " their doctrine of Evolution by showing that the 
modern embryonic development of the individual follows this (ar- 
tificial) succession in time. No wonder most scientists have got 
tired of such whirligig reasoning. 

Professor Dennert declares that unless " a definite end be put 
to this family-tree nuisance " by Haeckel and others, the books 
containing them will soon " be relegated to the lumber-room of 
science, there to turn yellow among dust and cobwebs." 

(78) 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



79 



sand, mud, clay, gravel, and peat, are, in the geological 
sense, " rocks," quite as much as granite, sandstone, or 
limestone. 

Rocks are broadly divided into two classes, igneous, or 
fire-formed, and aqueous, or water-formed, rocks. Regard- 




COLORADO CANYON 



80 GOD'S TWO BOOKS • 

ing the former class, we shall have little to say, as they are 
only incidentally connected with the line of thought upon 
which we are working. They include, however, not only 
the trap, basalt, etc., of true volcanic origin, but also the 
slates, quartzites, gneisses, schists, and granites, which are 
also termed metamorphic, or changed, rocks, because pro- 
duced, in some cases at least, from ordinary water-formed 
rocks by the action of a much more moderate degree of heat. 

Aqueous rocks are called sedimentary, because produced 
from a sediment deposited in water. They are also said to 
be stratified, because formed in successive strata, or layers, 
one on top of another. Ordinary gravel, sand, and mud 
belong to this class; and these, when hardened or consoli- 
dated, become, respectively, conglomerate, sandstone, and 
shale. They are said to be fossiliferous, when they contain 
fossils, or remains of plants or animals embalmed in their 
substance. 

In regard to the age of a series of layers found in their 
natural condition — 

those at the bottom must obviously be the oldest, because 
they must have been deposited before those lying above 
them. ... In all such cases, the beds at the bottom are 
the oldest, and those at the top the newest. This arrange- 
ment of one bed, or stratum, above another, in the order 
in which they were laid down, is called the order of super- 
position. — Sir A. Ceikie. 

Since it is almost solely in regard to time that the geolo- 
gists make their blunders; i. e., in false notions and rea- 
sonings regarding the time or relative age of these various 
successive layers, we must right here be on our guard. 
When we find one bed, or stratum, lying above another, 
the lower one is, of course, the older of the two; but 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



81 



GEOLOGICAL AGES AND PERIODS 
(As commonly understood) 



Cenozoic 


Quaternary 


Age of Man, 
50,000 years 


Tertiary 


Age of Mammals, 
3,000,000 years 


Mesozoic 


Cretaceous 


Age of Reptiles, 
7,000,000 years 


Jurassic 


Triassic 


Palaeozoic 


Permian 


Age of Amphibians and 

Coal Plants, 

5,000,000 years 


Carboniferous 


Devonian 


Age of Fishes, 
2,000,000 years 


Silurian 


Age of Invertebrates, 
10,000,000 years 


Cambrian 


Azoic 


Algonkian 


(No fossils) 


Archaean 



82 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



whether laid down ten minutes earher or ten million years 
earlier, how are we to determine ? — The common way is 
by the fossils they contain, as will be explained later; but, 
as this method is based on a series of pure, unfounded 
assumptions, its results have no weight whatever for us 
who want facts, not theories. Hence we are compelled 
to say that there is absolutely no way of telling how long 




Bird's-eye view of the Niagara gorge. It is thought that the 
falls have been steadily receding from the high bluff at Queens- 
ton Heights (Q. H.), and Lyell estimated the rate at about one 
foot per annum, or about thirty-five thousand years in all. More 
recently, however, G. K. Gilbert, of the United States Geological 
Survey, has estimated the average rate of recession at five feet 
per annum, and says that " the maximum length of time since 
the birth of the falls by the separation of the lakes is only seven 
thousand years, and even this small measure may need significant 
reduction." Sir William Dawson says about the same thing; 
and hence there is no difficulty in believing that it could easily 
have taken place within the limits of Biblical time. When we 
once get rid of the successive ages of uniformitarian geology, 
and admit the possibility of the Biblical deluge, all the old stock 
problems of the science are solved with little difficulty. 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 83 

the lower layer was deposited before the next succeeding; 
though, if the two are conformable to one another in bed- 
ding, and the bottom one shows no evidence of erosion upon 
its surface before the other was deposited, the strong prob- 
ability is that no great time elapsed between the laying down 
of the two layers. 

Another point to be noted here is that regarding the con- 
solidation, or hardening, of strata. It not infrequently 
happens that the upper bed or beds are much harder than 
those below them. This would not prove that the upper 
one was much the older, but would rather show that some 
kinds of rock harden, or consolidate, much more quickly 
than others. Indeed, some substances, such as limestone, 
become hard, or set, almost immediately on being precipi- 
tated from water, and a mixture of fine sand and iron filings 
will, if exposed to the weather, quickly become a hard mass, 
not readily distinguishable from some of the oldest deposits 
on the globe. Hence, the degree of solidification in a 
given series of beds is of very little use in determining their 
relative age. 

Regarding the term *' the earth's crust," Sir A. Geikie 
says: — 

This name came into use when people supposed the in- 
side of the planet to be an intensely hot, liquid mass, with 
a cool and comparatively thin crust outside. A great deal 
of dispute has arisen as to whether the main mass of the 
inside of the earth is Hquid or solid; but those who dispute, 
whatever their views may be, agree to use this phrase, " the 
earth's crust," as meaning that part of the earth which men 
can observe, from the top of the highest mountain to as 
far below the deepest mine as they can reasonably infer 
that the rocks must be. 



84 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

To this conventional definition we can all readily agree; 
though, since we are informed by one of the highest scientific 
journals in the world, that " modern analysis tends to the 
conclusion that our globe is solid throughout " {Nature, 
Feb. 28, 1901, page 414), we may decline to admit that 
it is now, or has ever been in the past, a " pulsating crust," 
rising and falHng ad libitum. 

One of the most marvelous, and, indeed, most perplexing 
facts about the rocks remains yet to be noted. In almost 
every corner of the world we find examples, perhaps ex- 




Upturned strata, Elk Mountains, Colorado 
tending over miles of the surface, of strata, not lying in 
the horizontal position in which they were deposited, but 
squeezed, fractured, and crumpled up in such an aston- 
ishing manner that they may be standing on their edges, 
or even completely overturned. We do not wish to convey 
the impression that all the cases of this nature described in 
the text-books, are really of this character. As we shall 
find hereafter, some supposed examples of this nature are 
of such enormous magnitude, and rest on such doubtful 
evidence as to reality, that it is not necessary to so under- 
stand them. But, on a small scale, we have numerous 
examples of this folding and crumpling of strata. What 
caused this contortion of the rocks nobody knows. 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 85 

For a few important definitions pertaining to this subject, 
such as " fault," " dip," " strike," " outcrop," " anticHne," 
and " synchne," we must refer the reader either to text-books 
on the subject, or to some good dictionary, such as the 
Standard, where such terms will be found explained with 
more minuteness than we can employ here, perhaps also 
accompanied by illustrations, without which a mere verbal 
description is of little use. 

Regarding the way in which the strata are generally 
treated, in order to assign each to its proper age in the 
long-drawn-out past that the geologists have taught us to be- 
lieve in, we give the following from Sir A. Geikie: — 

According to the law of superposition the undermost 
stratified rocks are the oldest. We can reach but a little 
way down into the earth. The deepest mines or borings 
descend but a very few thousand feet below the surface. 
If, therefore, these rocks still lay flat as they were deposited, 
we should be able to make ourselves acquainted only with 
those near the surface. But in consequence of the way in 
which the rocks have been bent, broken, and upheaved, 
we see, not only the topmost parts of the series, but even 
some of the oldest masses. Instead of lying flat, the rocks 
are very commonly found to slope into the earth more or 
less steeply, and we can walk over their upturned edges, 
like the backs of so many rows of books. So far, there- 
fore, from the bottom rocks being still buried under thou- 
sands of feet of solid rock, beneath which they once lay, 
they are often found rising into the summits of lofty moun- 
tain ranges. The geologist, consequently, does not need 
to sink deep bores and pits to find out the order of the rocks 
under his feet. By making careful sections from what can 
be observed at the surface, he can usually determine that 
order with certainty, and when he has done so, he knows 
which are the oldest parts of his chronicle, and which are 
the newest. — " Primer of Geolog}^,'* pages 1 37 , 138. 



86 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

We may admit this last statement, in a kind of general 
way, for any particular and limited locality; but when the 
geologists, in their usual fashion, begin to compare the rocks 
in distant localities, and affirm that the rocks in one country 
occurred chronologically, say, in between two other sets 
of beds in some other country, where no trace of suCh rocks 
is to be found at all, we demur; for the evidence is founded 
wholly on assumptions and fanciful guesses, as we shall here- 
after see. But it is in this very way that the " formations," 
or sets of rocks, are pieced together from strata found here 
and there, and all together assigned to some imaginary age 
or period in " the dark backward and abysm of time." 
This idea is the hardest for the young student to grasp 
of any in the whole range of geology; but, as no progress 
whatever can be made until this pons asinorum is crossed, 
it will be necessary to elucidate it as best we can. To do 
this, we quote from James Geikie: — 

The term " formation " is used very laxly by geologists. 
Sometimes it signifies a group of strata of inconsiderable or 
merely local importance, and occasionally the word is ap- 
plied to a single stratum. Those writers, however, who are 
more careful in matters of terminology, restrict the term 

formation " to those great groups of strata which are 
characterized by the presence of fossils having a fades [gen- 
eral aspect] so peculiar to themselves that it not only serves 
to mark off the strata from overlying and underlying de- 
posits, but to distinguish them wherever they occur through- 
out the globe. . . . By a " formation," then, it will be 
understood that we mean all the deposits . . . which accu- 
mulated over the surface of our globe ... at a time when 
the world was characterized by the presence of some par- 
ticular and peculiar fauna and flora. — " Historical Geol- 
og}),'' pages 12, 13. 



GOD»S TWO BOOKS 87 

Without stopping to discuss the arbitrary assumption con- 
tained in this last sentence, it will be seen that the formations, 
or sets of rocks, are not to be found all together in any one 
place in such relation that, by the law of superposition 
or stratigraphical evidence, one can be said to be older than 
another. Nor is a single formation, perhaps, completely 
found in any one place, but the rocks from perhaps half a 
dozen different countries have to be classed together to 
make the formation or group complete. Each of these 
groups, or formations, is confidently assumed to represent 
a period of time; all the various rocks over the globe hav- 
ing similar groups of fossils are classed together into one 
of these sets, or formations, and are supposed to have been 
laid down contemporaneously; and then, according to the 
prearranged scheme of life, — succession from the low to 
the high, — these various groups are fitted into their appro- 
priate places in this great imaginary ladder of life. And 
the geologist will assure us that we have in this arrange- 
ment a correct, scientific history of our globe. 

How much progress would have been made in physics, 
astronomy, or chemistry, if we had not followed a more 
logical style of reasoning than this? One can not help 
thinking that it would almost give Bacon and Newton uneasy 
slumbers if they knew what a burlesque on their methods 
had been taught for nearly a hundred years under the name 
of geology. And yet people have actually blamed the 
Bible because it did not agree with conclusions thus ob- 
tained ! 



CHAPTER VI 

A Belated Science 

IT is a singular and notable fact that, while most other 
branches of science have emancipated themselves from the 
trammels of metaphysical reasoning, the science of geol- 
ogy still remains imprisoned in a priori theories.—" The 
Glacial Nightmare and the Flood,'' Preface, vn, b^ Sir 
Henr^ Hotporth. 

This quotation, from a prominent English scientist, is 
a most unqualified impeachment of modern geology (as 
currently taught) as fit to rank among the inductive sci- 
ences. Certainly, the inductive method and the a priori 
method of reasoning are exact opposites. Hence, it is an 
abuse of language to speak of the current geology as one of 
the inductive sciences. Astronomy, physics, chemistry, were 
in this condition ages ago, and long continued thus; but, one 
after another, at the magic call of common sense and true 
Baconian methods, they " have emancipated themselves from 
the trammels of metaphysical reasoning." But, sad to 
say, this belated science of geology " still remains imprisoned 
in a priori theories." In fact, up to and even past the 
middle of the nineteenth century, no reputable scientist out- 
side of geologists themselves would allow that its leading 
principles were inductively obtained or capable of scientific 
proof. Both Huxley and Spencer used very caustic lan- 
guage in speaking of the methods employed by geologists in 
obtaining their conclusions, while the calm and masterly esti- 

' For a fuller sfafemeni of the geological argument see the author's "Illogica 
Geology: The Weakest Point in the Evolution Theory." 

(88) 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 89 

mate of Whewell was that little or no advance toward 
a real and stable science, like those of astronomy, physics, 
and chemistry, etc., had yet been made by geology. " We 
hardly know," he says, " whether the progress is begun. 



in the present condition of our f^nowledge and 
of our methods (sic), one verdict — ''not proven 
and not provable " — must he recorded against all 
grand hypotheses of the paleontologist, respecting 
the general succession of life on the globe. — T. H. 
Huxley, in "Discourses Biol, and Geol.," 
PAGES 279-288. 



Though the onion-coat hypothesis is dead, its 
spirit is traceable, under a transcendental form, 
even in the conclusions of its antagonists. — HER- 
BERT Spencer, in " Illustrations of Uni- 
versal Progress," page 343. 



The history of physical astronomy almost commences with 
Newton, and few persons will venture to assert that the 
Newton of geology has yet appeared." — " History of the 
Inductive Sciences,'' Vol II, page 580, third edition, 
1858. 

Here the matter remains even to-day. Geology has not 
yet been regenerated, as have all the other sciences; it has 
made absolutely no advance in its general plan since a 
systematic study of the rocks first began a century or more 



90 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




SIR ISAAC NEWTON (1642-1727) 

This " Prince of Philosophers " was not only the discoverer of 
gravitation and one of the founders of astronomy and physics, but 
he was among the first to state the limits and relative value of 
inductive and deductive methods of reasoning, and the way in 
which they should be employed in science. If modern geologists 
could only be induced to adopt his " Regulae Philosophandi " (rules 
of reasoning) as already established in the other sciences, we 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 91 

ago. The crude generalizations, which the pioneers then 
hastily adopted to explain some local phenomena in a few 
corners of Western Europe, have developed into iron dog- 
mas, which still dominate geological thought, in spite of a 
thousand modern discoveries contradicting them. This and 
some following chapters will be written to amplify and illus- 
trate these acknowledged facts. 

A priori (literally, from what is before) is a term used 
to denote a method of reasoning which proceeds from cause 



It is a singular and a notable fact, that while 
most other branches of science have emancipated 
themselves from the trammels of metaphysical rea- 
soning, the science of geology still remains im- 
prisoned in "a priori " theories. — SiR H. H. 
HOWORTH. 



to effect, from ^ general principle to its logical conclusion. 
Geometry is an example of this method. Even in natural 
science it has an honored place, when we have arrived at 
a broad general truth which is absolutely certain. The 
opposite of this is to reason from observed effects so as to 
discover the cause behind them; to take a number of scattered 
facts in nature, and, by correlating them together, trace out 
the principles or laws embracing them. This is the inductive 
method, the modern scientific method, the method of Bacon 

might soon have a chance to forget some of the blunders now 
masquerading under the name of science. 

It should be remembered that Newton was a reverent Christian, 
and has left us some splendid commentaries on the prophecies of 
Daniel, for which he was severely criticized by Voltaire. 



92 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




JAMES HUTTON (1726-1797) 

In point of general education Hutton was not as ignorant as 
was William Smith, the " Father of Geology ; " nor was he as 
closely tied down to the narrow circle of his birthplace as 
Werner. He understood what there was of chemistry at that time, 
and had traveled somewhat on the Continent. His " Theory of 
the Earth" (1785), the prototype of Lyell's "Elements of Geol- 
ogy," had this virtue about it that it urged that geology ought 
not to be considered a cosmogony. An adherence to this prin- 
ciple would have saved the world from many tons of what will 
some day be yellow waste paper. 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 93 

and Newton, and is the way in which everything worth 
knowing in nature has been discovered. But, by the con- 
fession of Howorth, who is himself a voluminous and highly 
respected writer on geology, this belated science needs to 
face square about, as the other sciences have long since done, 
and proceed by wholly different methods. The reason for 
this change, and the manner of bringing it about, is the task 
before us. The buried dead of our earth's past have writ- 
ten their own epitaphs on the rocky tombstones of the earth; 
and the reading of these epitaphs makes up the larger part 
of the science of geology. But it is certain that by false 
methods of reasoning, methods which, as Howorth says, 
have " all the infirmity of the science of the Middle Ages," 
we can never hope to read them aright, or discover from 
them a single fact or principle of which we can be certain 
regarding the conditions of their life or their burial. 

As we have found that Darwinism is based on three false 
assumptions, one of which is geology, so the latter science, 
as taught, is itself based on a trio of assumptions which we 
must now examine. 

The first of these is that of uniformii]), sometimes called 
the quietistic theory, which says that the action of the ele- 
ments during all past time has been uniform with the present 
in character, perhaps even in degree, and that the land- 
scape spread before us now in mountain and valley, river 
and lake, is but the final result of activities identical in 
character and methods with those that are now going on 
around us. 

The first thought which probably occurs here to the 
reader is that this theory is a point-blank denial of the 
Biblical deluge. This alone is sufficient to make it more 



94 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

than suspicious to the beHever of Genesis; he knows there 
must be something wrong with such a doctrine. But our 
task now is to determine in a scientific way just where and 
how it is wrong. This, however, is not hard to do ; for it is 
easy to see that this theory of uniformity is an assumption 
at the beginning, not a conclusion or induction at the close, 
of our investigation of the rocky records of the past. It is 
certainly not a conclusion from any fact or series of facts 
in nature; for how can we be sure that the elements have 
always acted in the regular, methodical way they have 
since human observation began? There is nothing in the 
rocks to support such an idea, but everything to the con- 
trary. And it is strangely out of harmony with the modern 
spirit of inductive science to start out with this preliminary 
assumption of a great general fact, the truth or falsity of 
which ought only to come in as a law arrived at as a gen- 
eralization from the sum total of our investigations. 

We are not ignorant of how the forces of nature now 
act, the degrees of their intensity, and the results of their 
work. Hence, instead of prejudicing the case at the be- 
ginning of our investigations by assuming this uniformity 
during all past time, we say confidently that the only scien- 
tific method is to make the truth or untruth of this general 
law a subject for investigation. Whether the air, the rivers, 
and the sea have always acted as we "now see them act, it 
is our business to find out. To assume this general prin- 
ciple as a preliminary to our investigations of the past is 
forever to keep our science in the swaddling-clothes of de- 
ductive methods. If this science is good for anything at 
all, it is surely capable of deciding for us very positively 
whether or not the tools of nature have always worked 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 95 

at the same rate and with the same force as at present; 
and the candid investigation of this problem is without 
doubt the most important question that can engage our at- 
tention as students of this science. 

We may all agree that the laws or methods of nature 
are unchangeable; but who shall define for us the limits 
of natural law? When we assume, as modern geologists do, 
that things have always happened, and must always hap- 
pen, as we see them now occur about us, we are surely get- 
ting very unscientific in our self-conceit. How is it that we, 
the creatures of a day, know the limits of nature's powers, 
or that we dare boast of having mastered all her marvelous 
laws? We know not any one with the courage to affirm 
this in the abstract, though it seems that we are, many of 
us, inclined to arrive at conclusions, or adopt methods of 
reasoning, which tacitly involve these preposterous assump- 
tions. This doctrine of uniformity is in effect assuming to 
possess this knowledge of all natural law, and is deciding 
beforehand what ought to be left as a subject for investiga- 
tion — both of which are the antitheses of true inductive 
methods. 

Whenever a human body is found dead in the open field, 
a coroner is called upon to investigate the matter, and find 
out, if possible, how death occurred. This coroner is, or 
should be, a man thoroughly acquainted with the normal 
action of the tissues and organs of the human body; for 
only by employing such knowledge can he hope to decide 
aright regarding the cause of the person's death. But let 
us suppose that this coroner has seen hundreds of bodies 
cut up in the dissecting room, when death has resulted from 
all sorts of disease, as well as old age, and that in all his 



96 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



subsequent practise he has made autopsies upon great num- 
bers of bodies of persons who have likewise died from 
every imaginable disease ; but that never in all his experience 
has he yet seen one where death has resulted simply from 
loss of blood, or bleeding to death. Such a thing, if not 
a probable case, will at least do as an illustration. What 
would we think of such a man if he were to proclaim to 
all that he had never seen a case where death had resulted 
from other than natural causes, and that he had no reason 

to believe that such had ever 
occurred? " This man is very 
old. He must be over eighty. 
There is very little blood in 
the body, as is usual in old age. 
But all the organs and tissues 
seem to be in a healthy condi- 
tion, and they evidently all 
gave out together. There has 
never been a crime of any 
kind about here in the mem- 
ory of the oldest inhabitant, 
and I do not believe this is anything but a natural death. 
People can't live forever, even if they have no disease." 
Such language would certainly sound very strange, and the 
crude methods of such an investigation would be very evi- 
dently absurd, but not really more so than this assumption 
of a uniform action of the elements during all past time. 
Geologists are only coroners at large. On every bed, 
nay, on every fossil, we must hold a post mortem, and de- 
termine, independently of all theories, how these creatures 
died, and how the bed was deposited. Uniformitarians 




DIAGRAM OF OUR 
SOLAR SYSTEM 



GOD*S TWO BOOKS 97 

would certainly make poor coroners, or, for that matter, 
poor investigators of law, or history, or anything else. 

The second postulate of geology which every true lover 
of inductive methods must object to assuming as a prelim- 
inary to all investigation, is that our globe originated by the 
hot process, in any manner whatever, — whether according 
to the theory of Kant, La Place, Madler, Lockyer, or Faye, 
— for they are all alike in teaching that our globe was 
once fluid throughout. 

The pro and con of this, as a theory in itself, is altogether 
aside from our present subject, but we must note how this 
assumption of a certain method of origin for our earth 



The heavens declare the glor^ of God; and 
the firmament shoTveth his handiwork'** — BiBLE. 



forms an integral part of the whole structure of modern 
uniformitarian geology. Of course this also is contrary to 
the origin of our world as given in Genesis. But even from 
the scientific standpoint, what have we to do with the origin 
of our world in this science of geology — a science based 
principally on an investigation of the fossiliferous rocks, and 
which can tell us about as much concerning the real condi- 
tion of our earth's interior as a fly can discover of the pulp 
of an orange by walking over an inch or two of its surface, 
and sucking at its rind here and there. As Prof. T. G. 
Bonney expresses it, " We can see about as much of the 
earth's interior as of a cricket-baH's stuffing through a few 
pin scratches on the leather." Hence it is surely the height 
7 



98 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



of absurdity to make any theory regarding our earth's ori- 
gin a postulate, or starting-point, on which to build anything 
that we wish to palm off as inductive science. 

That these two propositions — viz., uniformity, and the 
molten-interior-of-the-earth theory — are, wherever used in 
our text-books, pure assumptions and not conclusions of 
geology, few will, I think, deny. But these, useless and 



u^^tf^^^Bi^B^!^^^^'^''" 




•■ •: '-•■■■.;■• 


,mi 












•• 





Kindness of the Scientific American 

Nebulosity about Nova Persei. From a photograph by Prot 
G. ".V. Ritchey with the two-foot reflecting telescope of the Yerke* 
Observatory. Exposure three hours and fifty minutes. 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 99 

improbable, per se, though we may regard them, and far- 
reaching as they doubtless are in warping the conclusions 
of the scientific investigation of the rocks, are yet quite 
subordinate in their baleful effects on the science to the 
all-pervading power of the third postulate of this curiously 
deductive system; viz., that there has been a succession of 
life on the globe from the low to the high, and that relics 
of these successive life-forms are pigeonholed in the rocks 
to reveal this fact to us. In succeeding chapters we shall 
see how this idea, beginning as a crude and hasty generali- 
zation from a very few imperfectly understood facts, al- 
most instantly expanded into the iron dogma that it is to-day ; 
how it has continued to pervert the teachings of science 
for a hundred years, in spite of discoveries which have long 
since put it out of court even as a hypothesis; and how this 
idea, in fixing upon any fossil type or types as intrinsically 
older than all or any others, involved, from the very first, 
the utterly preposterous notion that, while one kind of fossils 
was being deposited in one locality, another and very diverse 
kind of life positively was not living or being fossilized in 
another distant locality — preposterous, we say, for who 
will claim to possess the supernatural knowledge of the 
past involved in such a statement? 



100 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




COUNT DE BUFFON (1707-1788) 

Buffon undertook to explain everything in the universe ; and he 
succeeded about as well for his day, and according to the meager 
scientific knowledge then available, as some modern writers have 
in our time, who persist in ignoring the only reliable guide we 
have for such a task, the Revelation given by<-he'One Being 



CHAPTER VII 

The Successive Ages 

A BOUT a century and a half ago, the French naturalist, 
**• Buffon, who, by the way, was not a practical geolo- 
gist, put forth the generalization that, over all the continents, 
the remains of the large land quadrupeds occur near the 
surface, showing that they lived in these regions at no very 
remote age; whereas, the deeper lying remains of marine 
creatures found as fossils are either entirely extinct, or are 
related to forms now found only in far-distant corners of 
the world. 

Crude and inaccurate as such a notion really is when ap- 
plied to the world as we now know it, it had enough of plau- 
sibility to recommend it to the scientists of that time, who 
knew only the rocks of a few corners of Europe, and were 
ignorant of the plants and animals to be found in other 
parts of the world. This hasty generalization became the 
foundation of the idea that the world has been peopled by 
successive assemblages of plants and animals; though, if 
Buffon had lived on the plain east of the Rocky Mountains, 
his rule of thumb about the order in which the fossils occur 
would make the huge Cretaceous dinosaurs of Colorado and 
Wyoming, and the giant amphibians of the Permian rocks 
of Texas, as much modern deposits as any Tertiary or 
Pleistocene; for in thousands of cases they occur as near the 
surface, and occupy as completely all the surface rocks, as 

who really knows. His scheme of successive ages of creation, 
professedly based on his crude geology, makes him the real father 
of the theory of life succession, and thus of biological Evolution. 

(101) 



102 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



do any of the so-called " recent " deposits of France, Ger- 
many, or England, which Buffon had in mind. 

Of course there is one way of proving the relative ages 
of strata which we can all acknowledge to be truly scientific. 
When we find undisturbed strata lying one above another, 
the lower one is evidently the older of the two; but whether 




SCENE TN THE BAD LANDS 

Where many remarkable fossils have been found 
laid down ten minutes earlier or ten million years earlier, 
how are we to tell, except by assuming the succession of 
life en bloc, and deciding the matter according to the fossils 
they contain? In doing this, we are also tacitly assuming 
uniformity, or that these beds, with change of flora and 
fauna, did not occur by any abnormal action of the elements 
which might wash different kinds of contemporary faunas 
and floras into their present positions. No one pretends 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 103 

that this test of superposition is of any service in comparing 
the rocks of distant or disconnected regions. How then 
shall we correlate the rocks of distant lands, except we 
assume that there has been a succession of life upon the 
globe in a particular order? 

All admit that everywhere there are, at the base of the 
fossil-bearing strata, rocks which are non-fossiliferous; and 
all agree in calling them Archaean. Now, where we find 
certain fossils next to the Archaean, with perhaps hundreds 
of feet of beds superimposed upon these lower ones, and 
containing successively very diverse kinds of fossils, the pre- 
sumption is — assuming uniformity — that these beds next 
to the Archaean are very, very old. But to say that there 
have been successive ages over all the globe, or that these 
lower fossils really lived for ages before others, even than 
some that may occur above them in this particular locality, 
is to assume, either — 

1 . That these hypothetically oldest beds encircled all 
the Archaean rocks, like Werner's onion-coats; or, — 

2. That, while these beds were forming in this locality, 
other and very diverse kinds of plants and animals positively 
were not living or being buried in other distant localities. 

It would appear that this onion-coat hypothesis was still 
entertained by Smith and Cuvier, and the other early nine- 
teenth-century geologists, having been inherited from Wer- 
ner. Though now professedly repudiated, it was not given 
up till they had the details of their " phylogenic series " 
all arranged according to the start they got from one or 
two localities in Western Europe. It was bad enough to 
conclude that, because the fossils occurred in a certain 
order in a few localities in England or France, therefore 



104 



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2 H 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 105 

they must throughout the whole world occur in this particular 
order, which is only the " onion-coat " hypothesis applied 
to the fossils; but the only remaining alternative — viz., that 
while certain types of fossils were forming in a certain lo- 
cality, say New York State, other and very diverse fossils 
positively could not have been forming in other distant lo- 
calities, say, China and Australia — is scarcely less scien- 
tific. The supernatural knowledge of the past, or, rather, the 
dogmatism, involved in the latter position is so manifestly 
unscientific that no one has ever attempted to defend it, so 
far as we know ; and, accordingly, we must conclude, 
with Herbert Spencer in his trenchant remarks on " Illogical 
Geology," that, " though the onion-coat hypothesis is dead, 
its spirit is traceable, under a transcendental form, even in 
the conclusions of its antagonists." (" Illustrations of Uni- 
versal Progress," page 343.) 

To illustrate the matter, we may consider a more con- 
crete example. The Cretaceous coals of British Colum- 
bia are often found next to the granite, or Archaean; in 
Nova Scotia very similar coal beds, classed as Carbonifer- 
ous, also occur next to the Archaean. Now, how are we 
to prove, in any true, scientific sense of the word, that these 
coal measures of Nova Scotia are older, and according to the 
popular arrangement, almost immeasurably older, than the 
quite similar (in appearance) coal beds of British Colum- 
bia? We doubt if there is a man in America who would, 
offhand, undertake to frame any sort of answer at all to 
such a question, save that the Nova Scotia beds are Car- 
boniferous, and those of British Columbia are Cretaceous, 
and that therefore the former are immensely older than 
the latter. The more we consider the matter, the more 



106 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

clearly we see that nothing more scientific than this can 
possibly be given; that, in fact, we can not undertake to 
compare these localities, as to age, without assuming entire 
the succession-of-life idea. They both rest on the Archaean. 
How are we to be sure that, when the Carboniferous plants 
were living in Nova Scotia, the Cretaceous flora did not 
exist in British Columbia? It would be hard for us to 
believe in the mental soundness of the man who would 
profess to have this supernatural knowledge of the past. 
Instead of the long popular notion that only certain 
kinds of rocks are to be found next to the primitive, or 
Archaean, it is now a well-estabhshed principle that any 
kind of fossils whatever, even " young Tertiary " rocks, may 
rest upon the Archaean or Azoic series, or may themselves 
be so metamorphosed and crystalline as to resemble the 
most ancient rocks on the globe. As Dana expresses it: — 

Crystalline, or metamorphic, schists may occur in all the 
formations, from the earhest to the latest. — " Manual,'' 
page 408. 

Or, as Zittel puts it: — 

The last fifteen years of the nineteenth century witnessed 
very great advances in our knowledge of rock-deformation 
and metamorphism. It has been found that there is no 
geological epoch whose sedimentary deposits have been 
wholly safeguarded from metamorphic changes; and, as this 
broad fact has come to be realized, it has proved most 
unsettling, and has necessitated a revision of the stratigraphy 
of many districts in the light of the new possibilities. — " His- 
tory of Ceology, Etc.,'' page 360. 

We quote yet again from Dana, what he says about 
the " difficulties encountered in attempts to ascertain the 
true chronological succession: " — 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 107 

A stratum of one era may rest upon any stratum in the 
whole of the series below it, . . . the intermediate being 
wanting. The Quaternary in America in some places rests 
on Archaean rocks; in others, on Silurian or Devonian; in 
others, on Cretaceous or Tertiary. — " ManuaW page 399. 

Hence with our minds divested of all preconceived ideas, 
and " this broad fact " well " realized," where shall we 
look for the place to start our life-succession? That is, 
where in the whole world would we now go to find *:hose 
kinds of fossils which we could prove, by independent argu- 
ments, to be absolutely older than all others? It may 
seem very difficult for the world to discard a theory so long 
an integral part of all geology; but until it can be shown 
that this " broad fact " of Zittel's and Dana's is no fact 
at all, there would seem to be no possible escape from the 
acknowledgment that the doctrine of any particular fossils 
being essentially older than others is a pure invention, with 
absolutely nothing in nature to support it. 

For those acquainted with the ordinary methods of de- 
termining the age of rocks, no words of mine are needed 
to show how completely everything else is subordinated to 
this hypothesis of certain fossils having succeeded one an- 
other in regular order, or how the fossils themselves have 
become the one and only test of age. There was at one 
time in geology an " old red sandstone " and a " new red 
sandstone," and whenever a red sandstone was found, it 
was classed with the one or the other. But no one now 
regards color as of any particular help in classifying rocks. 
Thus James Geikie says : — 

When a geologist speaks of green-sand beds, he simply 
means certain strata that belong to the Cretaceous forma- 
tion, which may or may not consist of green sand. In short. 



108 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

such terms are mere names and not descriptions. — " His- 
torical Ceolog]),'' page 31. 

The same may be said of texture and mineral composi- 
tion. Dana says they are to be used " always with dis- 
trust," and are " usually to be disregarded." (" Man- 
ual," page 400.) Thus, what was once called *' old red 
sandstone," and now called Devonian, is about as often 
limestone or shale as sandstone; while the " chalk," or Cre- 
taceous, in scores of cases contains no chalk at all. In short, 
we all know that the geological names of groups or sys- 
tems of rocks mean only rocks containing certain kinds of 
fossils. 

Hence, since the life-succession theory originated from the 
idea that only certain kinds of fossils were to be found at 
the bottom, or next to the Archaean, and it is now settled 
that any kind of fossils whatever may be thus situated, 
it is as clear as sunlight that the life-succession idea is based 
on a myth, and that there is no way of proving what kind 
of fossil was buried first. 

But this is not all ; for not only may ** a stratum of one 
era rest upon any stratum in the whole of the series below 
it," as Dana says, " the intermediate being wanting," but it 
may rest conformably. The lower may be Devonian, Silu- 
rian, or Cambrian, and the upper Cretaceous or Tertiary, 
and thus millions on millions of years have elapsed after the 
first and before the following beds were laid down; but the 
conformability is perfect, and the beds have all the appear- 
ance of having followed in quick succession. Sometimes, 
too, these age-separated formations are lithographic all}) the 
same, and can onl^ be separated b^ their fossils. We may 
be permitted to quote two typical examples, both from the 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 109 

Canadian Northwest. The first is from the region about 
Banff, in Alberta, just east of the Rockies, as described 
in the Government Report for 1 886 : — 

East of the main divide the lower Carboniferous is over- 
laid in places by beds of lower Cretaceous age, and here 
again, although the two formations differ so widely in re- 
spect to age, one overlies the other without any perceptible 
break, and the separation of the one from the other is ren- 
dered more difficult by the fact that the upper beds of the 
Carboniferous are lithologically almost precisely like those 
of the Cretaceous [above them]. Were it not for fossil 
evidence, one would naturally suppose that a single forma- 
tion was being dealt with. — ''Annual Report,'' New Series, 
Vol. II, part A, page 8. 

Surely this is a most fearful example of the power of 
tradition to blind the minds of investigators to the meaning 
of the very plainest facts. 

Here is another example from the District of Atha- 
basca: — 

The Devonian limestone is apparently succeeded conform- 
ably by the Cretaceous, and, with the possible exception of 
a thin bed of conglomerate, of limited extent, which occurs 
below Crooked Rapid, on the Athabasca, the age of which 
is doubtful, the vast interval of time [ ? ] which separated 
the two formations, is, so far as observed, unrepresented, 
either by deposition or erosion. — Id., Vol. V, part D, 
page 52. 

The country over which these Devonian rocks were fol- 
lowed in quick succession by the Cretaceous, is not less than 
one hundred fifty miles long, by half as many miles wide 
— several thousand square miles, at the least. Here, then, 
is another most important evidence that the millions of ages 
alleged to have elapsed between these two formations, had 
no real existence. 



110 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

But let us proceed. There is another way of testing 
the rationahty of this life-succession idea. If these alleged 
ages had no real existence, and if certain fossils are not 
essentially older than certain others, one might reasonably 
expect that we would now and then find them reversed as 
to position, i. e., with the "younger" below and the 
" older " above. Accordingly, we have the following very 
necessary (?) caution, from Prof. H. Alleyne Nichol- 
son: — 

It may even be said that in any case where there should 
appear to be a clear and decisive discordance between the 
physical and the paleontological [fossil] evidence as to 
the age of a given series of beds, it is the former that is 
to be distrusted rather than the latter. — " Ancient Life 
History^,'' Etc, page 40. 

That is, whenever the fossils do occur in this reversed 
order, we must try to explain the puzzle by some other 
theory — the life-succession must not be questioned. To 
meet all ordinary cases of this character, where the dif- 
ferences involve only a few formations, representing only 
a few ages, or a few million years, the theory of pioneer 
*' colonies " was invented by Barrande, in 1852. But for 
extreme cases, say where Silurian or Cambrian fossils occur 
above Jurassic, Cretaceous, or Tertiary, there is in such a 
predicament always supposed to be what is termed a " thrust- 
fault," or " fold," often many miles in horizontal dis- 
placement, and it may be two or more miles in vertical dis- 
placement — inventions which deserve to rank with the no- 
torious '* epicycles " of Ptolemy, and must do so some day. 

Hundreds of examples of these reversed conditions are 
to be found in the ponderous volumes of the Government 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS HI 

Survey Reports of this and other countries. For a more 
extended discussion of this subject, as well as a consider- 
ation of other phases of the geological argument, the reader 
may consult the author's " Illogical Geology," already re- 
ferred to elsewhere. Here it must suffice to give a few 
illustrative examples. 

In the southern part of Alberta, east of the Rockies, 
and extending down across the national boundary line into 
the United States, is a portion of country several hundred 
miles square, at least, perhaps larger, where Cambrian fossils 
are found above Cretaceous. The inevitable " thrust- 
fault " is thus described by R. G. McConnel, one of the 
officers of the Canadian Geological Survey. He has just 
been speaking of "a series " of these " gigantic thrust- 
faults: " — 

One of the largest and most important of these occurs 
along the eastern base of the chain, and brings the Cam- 
brian limestones of the Castle Mountain group over the 
Cretaceous of the foot-hills. This fault has a vertical dis- 
placement of more than fifteen thousand feet [three miles], 
and an estimated horizontal displacement of the Cambrian 
beds of above seven miles in an easterly section. The 
actually observed overlap as shown, amounts to nearly two 
miles. The angle of inclination of its plane to the horizon 
is very low, and, in consequence of this, its outcrop follows 
a very sinuous line along the base of the mountains, and 
acts exactly like the line of contact of two nearly horizontal 
formations. 

The best places for examining this fault are at the gaps 
of the Bow [River] and of the south fork of Ghost 
River. . . . The fault plane here [Bow River] is nearly 
horizontal, and the two formations, viewed from the valley, 
appear to succeed one another conformably. ... At the 
gap of the south fork of the Ghost River, where the fault 



112 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



was next examined, the Cretaceous shales, after dipping 
below the surface, rise again about a mile further up the 
valley, and remain exposed for some distance before they 
finally disappear. — " Annual Report,'' New Series, Vol. 
II, part D, pages 33, 34. 

The accompanying illustration is taken from the sections 
given in the Report. It will, we think, be perfectly clear 
to most of our readers that there is nothing here at all to 
indicate a real fault, save that some poor Cretaceous fossils 
happened to be deposited here over several miles of country 

Devonian 
Cambrian 




Devonian 



Cretaceous 



ROCKS IN THE WRONG ORDER IN ALBERTA, CANADA 

According to the theory, these Cretaceous rocks ought to be 
on top and the Cambrian and Devonian deep down underneath. 
Their present position, with every physical appearance of having 
been deposited in this order, together with the immense area over 
which they extend (several hundred square miles, at least), is 
conclusive proof that the life succession is a myth. Dozens of 
examples like this have already been discovered in the Alps, 
Grampians, Appalachians, etc. 

before others classed as Cambrian. As almost the entire 
geological series, and untold millions of years, are sup- 
posed to lie in between the Cambrian and the middle Creta- 
ceous, such an enormous difference precluded the idea of 
pioneer *' colonies " of the latter in the former, or any sim- 
ilar way out of the difficulty. Hence the invention of this 
fairy tale about the Cambrian rocks sliding up on top of the 
soft Cretaceous over this vast area was the only remaining 
alternative; for, according to the theory, they could not 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 113 

possibly have been deposited as we find them, though the 
Hne between them " acts exactly like the hne of contact 
of two nearly horizontal formations," and though they " ap- 
pear to succeed one another conformably." 

In the recent work by Chamberlain and Sahsbury 
(*' Geology," Vol. Ill, page 165), we are told that these 
same conditions extend fifty miles or more to the south 
across the national boundary line into Montana, with these 
perverse Cretaceous beds still underneath the Paleozoic 
rocks. Hence we have at least several hundred square 
miles of country where Cretaceous fossils were buried be- 
fore Cambrian, Devonian, and Carboniferous, a fact which 
at one sweep wipes out forever in the minds of unprejudiced 
reasoners the whole vain system of successive geological ages. 

The mountains in eastern Tennessee are declared to pre- 
sent *' an almost identical structure " with the above. In 
the Highlands of Scotland is another famous case where 
some of the very " oldest " rocks are on top of " younger " 
ones over an extent of country many miles in length from 
north to south, and ten miles from east to west in the di- 
rection of the so-called " thrust." Dana says that " the 
thrust planes look like planes of bedding, and were long 
so considered." ("Manual," pages 111, 534.) In the 
Alps are very numerous examples of similar conditions, 
Dana mentioning one case where the rocks are " upside 
down over an area of four hundred fifty square miles " 
(Id., page 364) ; another case is recorded where the 
mountain masses are said to have " traveled from east to 
west a distance of about twenty-five miles from the Rhine 
valley to the Linth," and another case of nineteen miles 
(see Nature, Jan. 24, 1901, page 294) — all necessj- 
8 



114 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




SIR ARCHIBALD GEIKIE 

Director General of the British Geological Survey 

He is so delightfully candid and childlike in his reasoning that 
when he finds a series of rocks in an order the direct reverse of 
the time-honored theory of life succession, with every physical 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



115 



tated and described in minutest detail merely because some 
beds of fossils happen to be found in an order of sequence 
contradicting the traditional theory. The accompanying 
illustration from Geikie's " Text-Book " shows how much 
more natural it is to suppose that the rocks were really laid 
down just as we find them, the Eocene first and the Triassic 
and Jurassic afterward. A stranger to the theory of life- 
succession would never think of anything else. 




REVERSED CONDITION OF STRATA, GLARUS AND ST. GALL, SWITZERLAND 

How much more natural to suppose that these two sets of 
" schistose rocks " were once joined together, and /that the two 
sets o£ Jurassic (" Brown Jura" and " White Jura ") were also 
once joined together, and have since been separated by the wash- 
ing away of the part connecting them, than to invent these enor- 
mous folds merely to save the theory of life-succession. The 
length of the section represented here is about ten or twelve miles. 

So wholly immune to doubt or suspicion of their favorite 
theory are most geologists, that they often exhibit themselves 
in the most ludicrous light when describing these (to them) 
astonishing conditions. Thus Sir Archibald Geikie, in 
speaking of some sections of rocks in Ross Shire, which he 
himself had at first described as naturally conformable, de- 
clares : — 

Had these sections been planned for the purpose of de- 
ception, they could not have been more skilfully devised; 

appearance of having been laid down naturally in this order, he 
holds up his hands in amazement, and thinks he " may be excused 
if he begins to wonder whether he himself is not really standing 
on his head ! ! ! " — Nature, Nov. 13, 1884, pages 29-35. 



116 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

. . . and no one coming first to this ground would suspect 
that what appears to be a normal stratigraphical sequence 
is not really so. When a geologist finds things in this 
condition, he may be excused if he begins to wonder whether 
he himself is not really standing on his head. — Nature, Nov. 
13, 1884, pages 29-35. 

No further comment on these facts is needed. Some 
day, when the world wakes up to a realization of what 
these numerous reversed conditions mean, the present theory 
of successive ages will be added to the already large col- 
lection of discarded geological theories, to become the amuse- 
ment of the future student of the history of the science. 

The last point which we need to make in this connection 
is that the rivers of the world, such as those of India, the 
Danube in Europe, or the Colorado in America, in cutting 
across the country act precisely as if they knew nothing of 
the varying ages of the rocks in the different parts of their 
courses, but treat them all alike, as if they were of the 
same age, and as if they began sawing at them all at the 
same time. 

Let us sum up the facts we have learned about the way 
in which the fossils occur: — 

1. Any kind of rock, i. e., containing any kind of fossils, 
may rest on the Archaean, and may be so metamorphosed 
and crystalline as to resemble the very " oldest " rocks. 

2. Any kind of beds may rest in such perfect conforma- 
bility on any other so-called " older " beds over vast 
stretches of country that " were it not for fossil evidence, 
one would naturally suppose that a single formation was 
being dealt with," the beds having all the appearance of 
having followed one another in quick succession. 

3. That in very many cases, and over hundreds of square 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS H/ 

miles of country, these conditions are exactly reversed, and 
such very *' ancient " rocks as Cambrian Hmestones are on 
top of the comparatively " young " Cretaceous, while the 
line between them " acts exactly like the line of contact of 
two nearly horizontal formations," and in a natural section 
cut out by a river the two " appear to succeed one another 
conformably." This single fact alone is sufficient to des- 
troy the whole basis on which the life-succession theory rests. 

4. That the rivers of the world, in their courses across 
the country, completely ignore the varying ages of the rocks 
in the different parts of their channels, and act just as if they 
began sawing at them all at the same time. 

Now we know not what additional fact can be demanded 
or imagined to complete the demonstration that this mon- 
strous, unscientific notion of a life-succession, invented a 
hundred years or so ago in a fittle corner of Europe, to 
explain some local phenomena, is hopelessly out of joint 
with the facts regarding the fossiliferous strata as we now 
know them. 



CHAPTER VIII 

Extinct Species 

THERE is yet another way in which to test the value 
of this assumed Hfe-successi<Jn. In Eocene times, we 
are told, England was a land of palms. In fact, the rocks 
of this formation contain cycads, gourds, proteads (like 
the Australian shrubs and trees), the fig, cinnamon, screw- 
pine, and various species of acacias and palms. These rocks 




Mastodon Americanus. Remains of this gigantic elephant have 
been found over nearly all the United States and Canada. The 
tooth was about six inches long on the crown. 

abound in England and western Europe. Then, again, in 
the Pleistocene deposits of the same countries, which are 
said to be immensely younger than the others by many long 
ages, we find the various species of elephant and rhinoceros, 
with a hippopotamus, lion, and hyena identical with the 
species now living in the tropics, together with numerous 
other gigantic animals. 
(118) 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 119 

Now the problem is. How are we to prove that these 
various forms of animal life just mentioned (Pleistocene) 
did not live at the same time as the trees and plants (Eocene) 
given in the previous list? Lions and monkeys, hippopotami 
and hyenas, elephants and rhinoceroses, now live beneath 
the palms, acacias, mimosas, and other tropical plants rep- 
resented in the Eocene and Miocene beds. What is there 
to hinder us from believing that they all lived there together 
in that olden time? Surely it would be the very irony of 
scientific fate if forms now so closely connected in life should 
in death be so divided. 

To present it in another form. Why should we be asked 
to believe that these aca- 
cias, cinnamons, palms, etc., 
lived and died ages or 
millions of years before the 
lions, elephants, rhinoce- 
roses, hippopotami, came on 
the stage to feed upon them 
or enjoy their shade; and 
then, after these unnumbered ^°°^« «^ mastodon 

ages had dragged their slow length along and vanished 
into the dim past, and all these semitropical trees had 
shifted to the tropics or been turned into lignite, these 
lions, elephants, and hippopotami came into existence in 
these same localities, when no such plants existed anywhere 
in Europe? Surely they ought to give us some pretty sub- 
stantial reasons for such a violation of the " observed uni- 
formity of nature." Geologists generally boast that they 
have outgrown the crude ideas of Werner and his school 
when they spoke of ages of limestone making or of sandstone 




120 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



making; but it seems that they have not yet attained to 
that broad view of the essential unity of nature where the 
flora and fauna of our world are seen to be just as indis- 
solubly connected with each other; for nature could as 
easily be persuaded to produce for a whole age nothing 
in the shape of rock but limestone or conglomerate, as to 





SOME TRILOBITES FROM CAMBRIAN ROCKS 



accommodate her powers to such an unbalanced state of 
affairs as is spoken of above, with the plants in one age and 
the complementary animals in another. 

There is but one possible argument to justify this sepa- 
ration of these Eocene plants and the Pleistocene mammals 
into separate ages, and we must now examine it for what 
it is worth. 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 121 

It is said that all the animals of these early Tertiary 
beds are extinct species, also a good many of the plants; 
while the hyena, lion, hippopotamus, etc., of the Pleisto- 
cene are identical with the living species; and there is much 
evidence in favor of the mammoth being the direct ancestor 
of its nearest surviving relative, the Indian elephant. This 
being so important a point, and having such a vital con- 
nection with the whole question of a Hfe-succession, we 
may be allowed to go into the subject at some length, even 
at the risk of appearing tedious to some of our readers. 

As is well known, these Tertiary and Pleistocene deposits 
resemble one another so much in everything except their 
fossils, and occur generally in such detached and frag- 
mentary beds, that they are distinguished from one another 
and arranged in the accustomed order of time by the per 
cent of " living " and " extinct " shell-fish which they 
contain. 

In the words of Dr. David Page: — 

As there is often no perceptible mineral distinction be- 
tween many clays, sands, and gravels, it is only by their 
imbedded fossils that geologists can determine their Tertiary 
or post-Tertiary character. — " Introductory Text-book,*' 
page 189. 

If we were sure that these species became extinct one 
by one, as some are doing now, and that nothing has ever 
happened to cause many to become extinct at one time, it 
might be a rough guess at the relative age of a deposit to 
ascertain about what percentage of its forms belonged to 
extinct species. But it is hardly necessary to point out 
how all this presupposes uniformity, a doctrine which we 
have found to be not only a pointblank denial of the Biblical 



122 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

deluge, but even from the scientific standpoint a problem 
to be investigated and decided according to the evidence of 
the rocks, not a thing to be taken for granted previous to 
all investigation. It then occurs to us that the same meth- 
ods of reasoning would make the subfossil remains of the 
bison on the Western prairies almost infinitely older than 
those of the lion, hippopotamus, etc., in the Pleistocene beds 
of Europe; for (except for some few specimens artificially 
preserved, and which may be ignored in this connection) 
the bison is to-day absolutely extinct, while the Pleistocene 
mammals are still abundant in the tropics, and show no 
signs of surrender in the struggle for existence. Similar 
comparisons might be made with the great wingless birds 
of Madagascar, Mauritius, and New Zealand, with very 
many other examples, all tending to show that the mere 
fact of certain species being extinct, and others being now 
alive, is no trustworthy guide in determining the relative 
age of their remains, until we first find out how and when 
they happened to become extinct. 

Why was it that the lion, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, and 
elephant shifted from England to the tropics? How 
was it that some of these, the mammoth and rhinoceros, got 
caught in the merciless frosts of northern Siberia so suddenly 
that their flesh has remained untainted all these years, and 
is now, whenever exposed, greedily devoured by the dogs 
and wolves, it being as fresh as meat in a refrigerator? 

A warm, temperate vegetation, as well as the corals and 
other animals of warm waters, is found within eleven degrees 
of the north pole, and all scientists acknowledge that the 
elephants and other animals preserved in the frozen soil of 
Siberia lived where we now find their remains; while Dana 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



123 




TOOTH OF THE MAMMOTH 

(Showing the top surface) 



says that " the encasing in ice of huge elephants, and the 
perfect preservation of the flesh, shows that the cold finally 
became suddenly extreme, as of a single winter's night, 
and knew no relenting afterward." (" Manual," page 
1007.) Howorth adds that " this change of chmate must 
have been sudden, and must also have been continental." 
("The Mammoth and the Flood," page 94.) 

Admitting this sudden 
change of climate over half 
the world or so, is it not evi- 
dent that this same cause, 
whatever it was, may have 
brought about a good many 
other changes, and the extinc- 
tion of numerous other spe- 
cies which are so often sup- 
posed to imply the lapse of 
untold ages of time? If a 
large amount of money has 
disappeared, we may have 
lost it at various times and 
places by carelessness; but if 
a notorious criminal has been 
around in the meantime, it would rather need evidence on 
the opposite side to prove that the money was not taken 
by this criminal. This principle of the economizing of 
energy was laid down long ago by Newton, the founder 
of modern science, when he said that — 

more causes of natural things ought not to be admitted than 
are sufficient for explaining their phenomena; and, therefore, 




SKELETON OF THE MAMMOTH 

(Elephas primigenius) 



124 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

to naiural things of the same kind, the same causes ought 
to be assigned as far as possible. 

On this point we shall have more to say hereafter. The 
principle on which we wish to insist here is that the mere 
fact of certain species being alive, c^nd others extinct, gives 
no clue whatever as to the relative age of their remains, until 
we first ascertain how and when this extinction was brought 
about. Ignoring for the present the Biblical information 
regarding the deluge, we shall presently see that there is 
ample scientific evidence that a sudden and radical change 
in the climate of the northern regions (the whole world, 
in fact) has occurred since man was upon it, to say nothing 
of the other great changes in land and water occurring at 
this very same time. Yet no allowance, so far as we know, 
has ever been made for these changes as causes of exter- 
mination of all forms of life. But what nonsense is it, 
while completely ignoring this great world-catastrophe, to 
arrange the lucky survivors off on the percentage system, 
as if such an event had never happened. It would be much 
more reasonable and scientifically accurate to arrange the 
books of the Greek and Latin classics in chronological or- 
der, according to the percentage of their words which have 
survived into the English language. Indeed, it would be 
much like a coroner, at the inquest following a railway 
disaster, professing to arrange the exact order in which the 
various victims had perished by the proportionate number 
of surviving relatives which each had left behind him. The 
completely worthless character of such evidence of age be- 
comes, if possible, more apparent when we consider that 
very many of these so-called extinct forms are perhaps not 
really distinct (physiological) species from their living rep- 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 125 

resentatives of to-day; for, in spite of all that we have 
learned about variation, there seems to be little or no allow- 
ance ever made for the effects of a certainly greatly changed 
environment. If the fossil forms among shell-fish, etc., are 
not precisely like the modern in every respect, they are al- 
ways classed as separate species, in utter disregard of the 
striking anatomical differences between the huge Pleistocene 
mammals and their dwarfish descendants of to-day, which 
for a hundred years or so were positively said to be distinct 
from one another, but are now acknowledged to be identical. 

Of course no one denies that the strata teem with forms 
extinct for thousands of years, forms which we moderns 
have never seen alive. Other forms do not appear familiar 
to our modern eyes, because larger or of somewhat different 
form; but to say that they are actually distinct species from 
their modern representatives, or that no human being has 
ever seen them alive, are statements utterly incapable of 
proof. Up to about the year 1 869 it was stoutly maintained 
that man had never seen any of these fossil forms alive. 
But no one now maintains this view; for human remains 
have now been found along with undisturbed fossils of the 
Pleistocene, or even middle Tertiaries, while the drawings 
and paintings on the cave walls of southern P ranee represent 
reindeer, mammoths, etc., side by side, and are so wonder- 
fully accurate that no one can doubt that they were copied 
from life. Hence, the only question now (from a scientific 
standpoint) is. With how much of that ancient fossil world 
were these equally fossil men acquainted? 

If man lived in Miocene times, when, even according 
to the geological arrangement, a luxuriant vegetation spread 
over all the arctic regions, what possible evidence is there 



126 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



to show that his companions, the rhinoceros, hippopotamus, 
mammoth, etc., were not also Hving then, and browsing 
off just such plants, when the arctic frosts caught them in 
the grip of death, and preserved their mummies untainted 
for our astonishment and scientific information? Things 
which are equal to the same thing &re equal to each other. 
Why should not the plants and animals contemporary with 





A kind of polyp-coral found as a fossil in the rocks near Point 
Barrow, in the arctic regions, proving that these now icy waters 
were once warm like those now in the tropics, for corals can not 
live in water colder than 68° or 70°. 

the same creature (man) be acknowledged to be contem- 
porary with one another? If man was positively contem- 
porary with the Miocene vegetation (we are still arguing 
from the popular scientific standpoint), and the Pleistocene 
mammals are now acknowledged on all sides to have been 
contemporary with man, what is there to forbid the idea 
that the Pleistocene mammals and the Miocene flora were 
contemporary with one another? 

For nearly half a century, geologists have never had 
the courage to face this problem fairly and squarely, with 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 127 

all preconceived prejudices about uniformity cast aside. Is 
it possible that all the Tertiaries and the Pleistocene may 
be really a unit after all? The trouble would then be 
that, with this much conceded, the whole phylogenic series 
would tumble with it, and become only the taxonomic 
or classification series of that ancient world with which 
those fossil men were acquainted. To appropriate the words 
of another, we know of nothing against this view save 
" the almost pathetic devotion of a large school of thinkers 
to the religion founded by Hutton, whose high priest was 
Lyell, and which in essence is based on a priori arguments 
like those which dominated medieval scholasticism, and made 
it so barren." 

Baron Cuvier's work in the line of comparative osteology 
has never been surpassed, perhaps never equaled, since, and 
he is generally admitted to have been the greatest naturalist 
and comparative anatomist of that, or perhaps of any time; 
yet he maintained most positively that all those which we 
now call the Pleistocene mammals were distinct species from 
the modern ones; and it is only in recent years and with 
extreme reluctance that many of them have been admitted 
to be identical with the ones now living. This shows how 
utterly unsafe it is to trust to the current assertions about 
all the Mesozoic and Paleozoic species being extinct; for 
even now, in spite of all that we have learned about the 
surprising possibilities of variation, little or no allowance 
for the potent influences of a changed environment seems 
ever to be made when the fossil forms are being considered. 
They are not all physiological species that can be separated 
as morphological species, and the skeleton, often only a 
fragment of it, is all that we have to depend upon in the 



128 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




KARL ZITTEL (1839-1904) 

Late Professor of Geology and Paleontology in the University of 
Munich; Director of the Natural History Museum of Munich, etc. 

One of the greatest of modern geologists. He was a candid rea- 
soner, indulged in no fantastic speculations, and did not believe 
in calling a thing a scientific fact until it is established beyond 
question. His " History of Geology " is the best work we have 
dealing with the strange history of this science. 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 129 

case of the fossils. If the numerous varieties of the do- 
mestic dog were all extinct and known to us only as fossils, 
we would doubtless not only have a dozen new specific 
names invented immediately, but such extreme types as pug 
and greyhound, St. Bernard and Scotch terrier, might even 
be erected into distinct genera; and, of course, they would 
all have to be arranged in single file, to show their geo- 
logical succession in time. 

Zittel gives us a peep behind the scenes which helps us 
somewhat to estimate the value of a percentage of extinct 
.species as a test of age. He pictures the uncritical work 
of the earlier writers on paleophytology, or the science of 
fossil plants, how — 

many of the fossil genera and species had been based on 
insufficient grounds of distinction, and how often miserably 
preserved fossil remains, whose identification was impossible, 
had been used for the erection of new genera or made the 
basis of some wonderful new hypothesis. Many of the 
special papers on fossil plants had been contributed by au- 
thors with insufficient botanical training, and were in conse- 
quence an untrustworthy foundation for any inductive rea- 
soning regarding the past periods of vegetation and their 
climatic conditions. — " History of Geology,'* page 373. 

August Schenk, late professor of botany in Leipzic 
(1868-91), by more critical methods, " practically initiated 
a reform in paleophytology." Zittel declares that " now, 
the author of a paper on any department of paleophytology 
is expected to have a sound knowledge of systematic bot- 
any " (Id., page 375), and adds, " It can not be said that 
paleozoology [the science of fossil animals] has yet ar- 
rived at this desirable standpoint." But he justifies this 
charge of want of confidence by saying that — 

9 



130 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

comparatively few individuals have such a thorough grasp 
of zoological and geological knowledge as to enable them 
to treat paleontological researches worthily, and there has 
accumulated a dead weight of stratigraphical-paleontological 
literature wherein the fossil remains of animals are named 
and pigeonholed solely as an additional ticket of the age 
of a rock deposit, with a wilful disregard of the much more 
difficult problem of their relationships in the long chain of 
existence. The terminology which has been introduced in 
the innumerable monographs of special fossil faunas, in the 
majority of cases makes only the slenderest pretext of any 
connection with recent systematic zoology. If there is a 
difficulty, then stratigraphical arguments are made the basis 
of a solution. Zoological students are, as a rule, too act- 
ively engaged and keenly interested in building up new 
observations to attempt to spell through the arbitrary pale- 
ontological conclusions arrived at by many stratigraphers, 
or to revise their labors from a zoological point of view. — 
Id., pages 375, 376. 

This scathing impeachment of the trustworthiness of the 
current specific and generic distinctions established for the 
fossil animals, has no doubt a special reference to the case 
of the lower forms of life; for if, in spite of the masterly 
and withal careful work of Cuvier, Owen, Wallace, Hux- 
ley, and Ray Lankester, there are still grounds for such 
grave doubts of the values of specific distinctions in the case 
of the mammals, whose general structure and fife history ^ 
are so well known and their almost countless examples of 
variation so well studied out, what must it be in the case 
of the lower vertebrates, and especially of the invertebrates, 
whose general life history is in so many instances only dimly 
understood, and the limits of their variations absolutely un- 
known? Remembering this, what is our amazement when 



1 Individual history from birth to death. 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 131 

we read in this same volume by Professor Zittel (page 400) 
that the modern tendency is toward the erection of the closest 
possible distinctions between genera and species, until recent 
paleontological literature is fairly inundated with new names ; 
and all this with the purpose, unblushingly avowed, of en- 
hancing the value of such distinctions as a means of deter- 
mining the relative ages of strata, and to bring the ontoge- 
netic and phylogenetic development of the various forms 
into more apparent agreement. 

Though Zittel himself plainly does not approve of these 
methods, there is no doubt that the practise referred to is 
quite general throughout modern paleontological literature. 
We can only look upon it as a most fearful example of 
intelligent men being hypnotized by their theory into blind 
obedience to its suggestions and necessities. 

Not long ago we had occasion to write to a well-known 
geologist about a Lower Cambrian mollusk which appears 
strikingly like a modern species. We here give an extract 
from his reply which bears directly upon this point. We 
withhold the name, for it was given in a half-confidential 
manner, but may say that the author's work on the Paleozoic 
fossils is recognized on both sides of the Atlantic: — 

Some geologists make it a point to give a new name to 
all forms found in the Paleozoic rocks, i. e., a name differ- 
ent from those of modern species. I was taken to task by 
a noted paleontologist for finding a pupa [a kind of land 
snail] in Devonian beds; but I could not find any point 
in which it differed from the modern genus [(?) species]. 

Such disclosures speak volumes to those able to under- 
stand, and lead one to receive with a smile the familiar 
assertion that all the species of the Paleozoic and other 



132 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



older rocks are extinct. And we can now form a truer 
estimate of the high scientific accuracy of Lyell's ingenious 
division of the Tertiary beds according to their contained 

percentages of hving or extinct 
mollusks. But, O, " tell it 
not in Gath! 

Going back now to our 
main subject, which was a 
denial of the reality of a life- 
succession and of the " ages " 
of the common text-books, we 
must bear in mind that the 
present classification of the 
fossils was outlined in all its 
general detail when little or 
nothing was known of the 
contents of the depths of the 
ocean, or even of the land 
forms of Africa, Australia, 
and other foreign countries. 
Zittel shows how, up to 1 820, 
little or nothing of a scientific 
character was known of any 
of the classes of living ani- 
mals save mammals. We 
need not go into this subject at 
length, but it may suffice to say that during the last half cen- 
tury or more a steady progress of discovery has resulted in 
showing case after case where families and genera long 
boldly said to have been extinct since Paleozoic time are 
found in thriving abundance and in little altered condition in 




RIxNTG-TAILED LEMUR 

(Lemur catta) 

The lemurs are now con- 
fined to Madagascar and a 
few other localities that 
skirt the Indian Ocean. 
Their fossils are found only 
in the Eocene rocks of Eu- 
rope and America. How 
they managed to skip all the 
other formations from the 
Eocene to the modern we 
are not informed. 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 133 

unsuspected places all over the world. Nor need we here 
dwell on the obvious absurdity of these inhabitants of the 
modern seas and the modern land, skipping all the uncounted 
millions of years from Paleozoic times down to the recent; 
for, though found in profuse abundance in these older rocks, 
not a trace of many of them is to be found in all the subse- 
quent deposits. The lemurs, for example, are found fossil in 
the Eocene rocks, and are living to-day in Madagascar. 
The cestraciont sharks, alive now in the seas between Japan 
and Australia, are found as fossils only in the Mesozoic 
rocks, and thus skip the whole Tertiary period. The Dip- 
noans, or lung-fishes, jump from the Jurassic to the modern; 
the numerous species of Globigerina, etc., found in the chalk, 
have also skipped the whole Tertiary period; the Crinoids 
did the same; while some of the starfishes have skipped all 
the uncounted millions of ages(?) from Paleozoic times 
down to the recent, as have also the Cyathophylloid corals. 
The list indeed might be ^tended to almost any length, if 
some one only had the courage to attempt to spell through 
the dead weight of new names under which the real mean- 
ing of the story of the rocks now lies buried. 

To sum the matter up in two sentences: The early geol- 
ogists assumed that the rocks over all the world must occur 
in precisely the same order as they did in England, France, 
and Germany; we have found that they may occur in any 
order whatever, often reversing this order entirely. They 
assumed that all the fossil types of life were absolutely 
extinct species; modern biology has proved the identity with 
living types of thousands of forms scattered through all the 
rocks, from the Pleistocene to the Cambrian, and the list 
is every day increasing. All of which reminds us of the 



134 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

old tale of the three little green peas in the little green pod, 
who, noticing that their little world was all green, and they 
themselves green also, shrewdly concluded that the whole 
universe must be green likewise. The current notion about 
the successive geological ages rests upon methods as crude 
and assumptions just as false as those of the little green peas. 



CHAPTER IX 

Leading Facts About the Rocks 

CHAPTER VI opened with a statement from Howorth 
that " the science of geology still remains imprisoned 
in a priori theories." The three leading postulates, or hy- 
potheses, unproved and unprovable, on which we found the 
science to rest were: — 

1. The uniformly quiet and regular action of the ele- 
ments. 

2. The originally molten condition of our globe. 

3. The successive ages, certain kinds of life only exist- 
ing at certain times, and succeeding each other in a regular 
and definite order. 

Having thus established our general argument that the 
modern evolutionary geology is thus the reverse of an in- 
ductive science, being based on at least highly questionable 
postulates and axioms, surely every friend of true science 
will welcome any prospect of refounding it on a truly in- 
ductive basis. The facts on which a safe and true induction 
can be based must now occupy our attention. 

In Chapter VII, in discussing the postulate of the succes- 
sive ages, we developed the following very remarkable facts 
about the way in which the rocks occur, which effectually 
dispose of the venerable myth that they occur only in a reg- 
ular order of progress from the low to the high: — 

1 . The ** broad fact," as stated by Zittel and Dana, 
that any kind of rocks whatever — i. e., containing any 

(135) 



136 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

kind of fossils — may rest on the Archaean, or may them- 
selves be metamorphosed and crystalline. 

2. That any kind of beds may rest in such perfect con- 
formability on any other so-called older beds over vast 
stretches of country, that, " were it not for fossil evidence, 
one vv^ould naturally suppose that a single formation was 
being dealt with," while " the vast interval of time " inter- 
vening is " unrepresented either by deposition or erosion.' 

3. That in very many cases and over many square miles 
of country these conditions are exactly reversed, and such 
very ancient rocks as Cambrian limestones occur on top of 
the comparatively young Cretaceous, while the line between 
them " acts exactly like the line of contact of two nearly 
horizontal formations," and in a natural section cut out by 
a river, the two " appear to succeed one another conform- 
ably." 

4. That many of the rivers of the world in working across 
the country completely ignore the varying ages of the rocks 
in the different parts of their channels, and act precisely as 
if they began sawing at them all at the same time. 

Now when we say that these facts taken together put the 
life-succession theory utterly out of court as a possible ex- 
planation of the facts of the rocks, we are only stating a 
very obvious truth in a very mild way. They certainly 
show that no one kind of fossil can be proved to be intrin- 
sically older than any other kind; hence, that no one kind 
of fossil life can be proved to be older than man himself. 

But this is merely negative evidence; and, while it should 
utterly dispose of the life-succession theory for all coming 
time in the minds of all persons capable of appreciating 
scientific evidence, it is obvious that we have not by this 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



137 



method disposed of the problem presented by the rocks 
themselves. These rocky medals of past events, struck by 
nature while these acts were in performance, are themselves 




Sequoia smittiana^ similar to the " big trees " of Californi 
very common in the Cretaceous rocks of Greenland. 




Leaf of a fossil Eucalyptus, also found in the Cretaceous rocks 
of Greenland. The sassafras, tulip tree, magnolia, poplar, willow, 
maple, birch, elm, >etc., all flourished in profusion away within 
the arctic circle, about as far north as explorers have ever gone. 

on our hands, and must be put together in such a way as 
to lead to a safer and more modern induction than any of 
the theories of Cuvier, Smith, or Werner. 

In addition to these facts already enumerated, there are 



138 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




JAMES D. DANA, LL. D. (1813-1895) 
Late Professor of Geology and Mineralogy in Yale University 
His writings are clear, transparently candid and honest, and he 
as without doubt the best-known writer on geology in America. 



GOD^S TWO BOOKS 



139 



some four or five other facts about the fossil world which 
are just as essential in the framing of a sound and safe in- 
duction. These facts must now be given : — 



The animal and vegetable relics found in the 
polar regions uniformly testify^ that a warm cli- 
mate has in former times prevailed over the whole 
globe. NORDENSKIOLD, IN GEOLOGICAL MAG- 
AZINE, Vol. XII, PAGE 531. 



1. All of 
the fossils 
(save a very 
few of the 
s o-call ed 
Glacial age, 
and they 
admit o f 
expl a n a- 
other easy 
tion) give 
us proofs of 
a n almost 
eternal 
spring hav- 
i n g pre- 
vailed in the arctic regions, and semitropical conditions in 
north temperate latitudes; in short, they give us proofs of a 
singular uniformity of climate over the globe, which we can 
hardly conceive possible, let alone account for. 




A large mollusk (Machirea magna), often eight 
inches in diameter, with other Paleozoic fossils. 
From the Silurian rocks. 



140 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




The gigantic Brontops robustus, from the upper Missouri Its 
body was about twelve feet long. 




Another Dinosaur (Stegosaurus ungulatus). Some of the plates 
on its back were two feet long. 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



141 




Diprotodon australis. A monstrous kangaroo from Australia, 
■' as large as a hippopotamus, and somewhat similar in habits, the 
skull alone being a yard long." — Dana. 

The proofs of this are unnecessary, as they are to be 
found on almost any page of any modern text-book of the 
science. That these genial and mild conditions prevailed up 
to and until the mammoth and his fellows were caught in 




Brontosaurus excelsus, from Wyoming. It was about sixty 
feet long and fifteen feet high. Found in Jurassic rocks. Other 
Dinosaurs were eighty feet long, " while at the same time they 
had a height of body and massiveness of limb that, without evi- 
dence from the bones, would have been thought too great for 
muscle to move." — Dana. 



142 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

the merciless frosts of our present arctic climate, there is 
not a particle of doubt. As Howorth says, the " Drift 
period " and the Pleistocene end together, and join on to 
the modern, while " the genial climate " then prevailing, 
as Dana declares, — 

was abruptly^ [Italics Dana's] terminated; for carcasses of 
the Siberian elephants were frozen so suddenly and so com- 
pletely at the change that the flesh has remained untainted. 
— " The Geological Story Briefly Told" page 230, edi- 
tion of 1875. 

The evidence is absolutely conclusive that all the time 
since creation down to this fatal hour was characterized by 
a surprisingly mild and uniform chmate over all the earth. 
The modern period is characterized by terrific extremes of 
heat and cold; and now little or nothing can exist where 
previously plant and animal life flourished in profusion. 

This radical and world-wide change in climate, therefore, 
demands ample consideration when seeking a true induction 
as to the past of our globe. That it was no gradual or 
secular affair, but that the climate *' became suddenly ex- 
treme, as of a single winter's night," the Siberian mummies 
are unanswerable arguments; that it occurred within the 
human epoch, all are now agreed. 

Our second great general fact about the fossil world 
seems to be a natural corollary from this one about climate. 
It is this: — 

2. The fossils, regarded as a whole, invariably supply 
us with types larger of their kind and better developed in 
every way than their nearest modern representatives, whether 
of plants or animals — radiates, mollusks, insects, fishes, 
amphibians, reptiles, birds, or mammals. 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



143 



This fact also is so well known that it needs no proof. 
The vain fancy of inherent progress upward is about as 
far as possible from the truth as brought to light by the 
fossils. Variation there is and variation there has been, 
sometimes even the elastic rebound 
toward former conditions or powers 
which is being so much studied now 
by the school of DeVries as " mu- 
tations " or " saltations." But 
with one voice do the rocks testify 
that the general results of such va- 
riation have not been upward. 
Rather must we confess as a great 
biological law that degeneration 
has marked the history of every 
living form. 

Our third general fact has been, 
already alluded to in the latter part 
of the previous chapter, about " Ex- 
tinct Species." We can give only 
an outline of the argument here. 

3. Viewing the rocks again as a 
whole, they are found to contain in 
great profusion splendidly devel- 
oped representatives of about all 
existing types of plants and animals 
representatives of many modern types, e. g., countless in- 
vertebrates, with other lower forms of animals and plants, 
we must go back to the Mesozoic or Paleozoic rocks; for 
they are not found in any of the more recent deposits. 

To illustrate the matter somewhat, let us take the case 




A MODERN CRINOID, OB 

SEA-LILY (Pentacri- 
nus decorus) 

Like those found in 
the Triassic and Juras- 
sic rocks. Somehow or 
other they forgot to 
leave any fossils in the 
rocks of all the inter- 
vening ages. 

; but to get the fossil 



144 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



of the Crinoids, already spoken of. They are now found 
in all of our deep waters. We find them also in great 
profusion in the Paleozoic and Triassic and Jurassic rocks, 
but not a sign of them, so far as we know, in any younger 
ones. The same may be said of the chalk found in the 

Cretaceous rocks, most of 
the species of which are 
identical with those of the 
ooze now found over the 
modern sea bottom. We 
are told that the greater 
part of Europe and 
America has been fath- 
oms deep under the sea, 
time and time again, 
since Jurassic and Cre- 
taceous times, and all the 
while enjoying a similarly 
mild climate. Why is 
it that these numerous 
types of life skipped all 
PENTACRiNus FAscicuLosus thcsc othcr formations, 

Crinoid, English Jurassic ^^^ ^^^^ ^^ f^^^ ^^ t^^^^ 

of either Crinoids or chalk over these thousands of miles 
of subsequent deposits? Or, considering how many of their 
characteristic types are alive in our modern seas, why are 
not the chalk and crinoidal limestones of the Mesozoic and 
Paleozoic rocks just as recent as the nummulitic limestones 
of the Eocene, or any other rocks? 

It is no answer at all to say that, though the general types 
are identical, yet many of the species are different. No one 




GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



14S 



has had the courage to attempt to spell through the flood or 
new names with which the science of the last half century 
has been inundated; but we would Hke more satisfactory 
proof of this assertion than the traditions and customs of a 
hundred years, and the exigencies of a fanciful theory; for 
we can not forget during how many years similar state- 
ments were persistently made regarding the great mam- 
mals. This worn-out argument of Cuvier's about extinct 
species has kept up a running fight with 
common sense for many decades, and, 
though driven backward from one point to 
another over the long, thin line of this tax- 
onomic series of the ancient world, it still 
contests every inch of ground. 

Let us try the tree-ferns and cycads of 
the coal beds of the Paleozoic and Meso- 
zoic. In northern regions they do not oc- 
cur later than the Triassic and Jurassic, 
and doubtless it is the same with the rocks 
in the tropics, where the modern species now 
live in fair abundance. But how did they ^^^^ Triassic 
come to shift to the tropics so many millions of years before 
the palms, etc., of the Tertiaries thought it time to do the 
same? The cHmate had not changed a degree. How did 
they come to scent the Glacial age so much earher than their 
more highly organized fellows? 

The " Challenger " Expedition some years since fished up 
some living Cyathophylloid corals from the bottom of the 
ocean, where they are now building away as in the olden 
time. Geologists were well acquainted with limestones corn- 
posed largely of their fossils, in Spitzbergen and elsewhere. 




ENCRINITES 
MONILIFORMIS 

Crinoid, Eng- 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




Another living Crinoid (Pentacrin-ts caput -me dus cb ) . from the 
West Indies. 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



147 



They were labeled " Carboniferous," or " Permian," and 
all these corals were thought to be extinct since then. But 
where have these creatures kept themselves during all the 
intervening ages, while the continents were seesawing up and 
down? Or why are not the rocks containing their fossils 
as recent as any of the other rocks? 




, i.s\"%II-M 



'^^m^ m 




FERNS FROM THE CARBONIFEROUS 



148 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




CYCLOPHTHALMUS BUCKLANDI 

A fossil scorpion of the 
coal-measures of Bohemia. 
The scorpions skip the Per- 
mian, Triassic, Jurassic, and 
Cretaceous rocks. 



We have spoken of the 
Dipnoans, or lung-fishes, 
that have jumped from the 
Jurassic to the modern. 
But their cousin, the Polyp- 
terus of the upper Nile, 
has performed a much more 
wonderful feat, for his an- 
cestors are found only in the 
Devonian rocks. In this he 
is scarcely alone, for the 
king-crabs (Limulus) and 
the scorpions have come 



down unchanged from the Carboniferous rocks, and forgot 
to leave any fossils in all the 
intervening ages. 

And so we might go on. 
There is hardly a tribe 
found in the older rocks 
which does not have its liv- 
ing representatives of to-day, 
and with, we believe, a fair 
proportion of the species 
identical, though in hun- 
dreds, perhaps thousands, of 
cases these species, genera, 
or even whole tribes, have 
somehow skipped all the in- 
tervening formations. Of 
course they go under differ- 
ent names in the literature, insects from the carboniferous 




GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



149 



for " some geologists make it a point to give a new name to 
all forms found in the Paleozoic rocks, i. e., a name different 
from those of modern species." Such 
doubtless will be the case just so long 
as, to repeat the words of Zittel, — 




CESTRACION PHII.IPPI 



the terminology which has been intro- 
duced in the innumerable mono- 
This is a modern graphs of special fossil faunas in the 
specimen; its fossils ^^^^^-^ ^f ^^3^3 ^^^^^ ^^l th^ 3!^^^. 
are found m the -, r • • 1 

Mesozoic rocks. derest pretext or any connection with 




recent systematic 
zoology. — " His^ 
tor}) of Ceolog^,*' 
pages 375, 316, 

This fact, num- 
ber 3, as stated, is 
a most important 
one in formulating 
any general induc- 
tion about the fossil 
world. 

Our fourth lead- 
ing fact relates to 
the condition in which we find the fossils, just as in an 
ordinary post mortem the presence 
of a bullet hole through the brain, 
or of arsenic in the stomach, ought 
to have quite a little influence on 

AMBLYPTERUS 

MACROPTERus thc vcrdict — and probably would 

A Ganoid of the do SO in the minds of all save med- 
Carboniferous sys- • 1 -r • - 
^gjjj ical unirormitarians. 



NUMMULITES LAEVIGATA 

The Sphynx in Egypt, with some of 
the stones in the Pyramids, are made of 
nummulitic limestone, and the shells of 
these fossils, protruding as they do 
from the surface of these monuments, 
are called " Pharaoh's beans " by the 
Arabs. 




15C GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

4. Samples of all the groups of rocks give us fossils 
in such a state of preservation, and heaped together in such 
astonishing numbers, that we can not resist the conviction 
that the vast majority of these deposits were formed in some 
sudden and not modern manner, catastrophic in nature. 

The supreme importance of this point makes it neces- 
sary that we should enter somewhat into details. One of the 
many geological myths dissipated by the work of the *' Chal- 
lenger " Expedition, which Zittel says " marks the grand- 
est scientific event of the nineteenth century,'* is that about 
the condition of the ocean bottom, and the work now being 
carried on there. The older text-books taught that, not 
only was the bottom of the ocean thickly strewn with the 
remains of the animals which died there and in the waters 
above, but also that the oceanic currents were constantly 
wearing away in some places and building up in others 
over all the ocean floor, and hence producing true stratified 
deposits. Accordingly, it was said that it was only neces- 
sary for this bed of stratified deposits to be lifted above 
the surface to produce the ordinary rocks that we find 
everywhere about us. But we now know, thanks to the 
" Challenger " Expedition, that the ocean currents have, as 
Dana says, " no sensible mechanical effects, either in the 
way of transportation or abrasion," and that beyond the 
narrow " continental shelf " surrounding the land, there is 
over the ocean bottom absolutely nothing save the fine ooze 
formed from minute particles of organic matter, like chalk. 
There is no gravel, no sand, no clay, no stratified or bedded 
structure of any kind whatever. (Dana, " Manual," page 
229.) 

We can, however, readily admit that stratified deposits 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



151 



are now forming on this narrow " continental shelf " about 
the shore of our existing seas and oceans, extending out 
to the one-hundred-fathom line, and also about the mouths 
of large rivers. But we think a study of the kind of organic 
remains to be recovered from these modern formations will 
remove many false ideas. 

It must be granted that the fishes themselves, to say noth- 
ing of land animals, stand a very poor chance of being 
buried intact. Thus Nordenskiold, the veteran arctic ex- 
plorer, so accustomed to 
those regions where animal 
life flourishes in such pro- 
fusion, remarks with amaze- 
ment on the difficulty of 
finding the remains of ani- 
mals or fish that have re- 
cently died, every relic of 
their existence having appar- 
ently disappeared. He con- 
cludes by saying : — 

It is strange, in any case, that on Spitzbergen it is easier 
to find the vertebrae of a gigantic lizard of the Trias than 
bones of a self-dead seal, walrus, or bird, and the same 
also holds good of more southerly inhabited lands. 

We might expect to find about the mouths of such rivers 
as the Hudson, Seine, or Thames, numerous fossiliferous 
remains of dogs, cats, and other domestic animals. And 
yet, in spite of the thousands of carcasses consigned to these 
waters, none of their remains have been found in recent 
excavations in the Thames deposits. (Popular Science 
Monthh, Vol. XXI, 1882, page 693.) 




Cycloids 

Miocene. 



LEBIAS CEPHALOTES 

from the French 



152 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



Dana explains the matter somewhat in the following 
language: — 

Vertebrate animals, as fishes, reptiles, etc., which fall to 
pieces when the animal portion is removed, require speedy 

burial after 
death to 
escape destruc- 
tion from this 
source [de- 
c o m position 
and chemical 
solution from 
air, rain-water, 
etc. ] as well 
as from ani- 
m a 1 s that 
would prey 
upon them. — 
"A/a nuaW 
page 141 . 

These car- 
casses of land 
animals 
brought down 
by the rivers 
are evidently 
devoured b y 
fishes before 

they have time to be buried by sediment. If a vertebrate fish 
should die a natural death, which of itself must be a rare oc- 
currence, the carcass would soon be devoured whole or bit 
by bit by other creatures near by. Possibly the lower jaw, 
or the teeth, spines, etc., in the case of sharks, or a bone 




PLATAX ALTISSIMUS 

A Ctenoid of Monte Bolca (Eocene) 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 153 

or two of the skeleton, might be buried unbroken, but a 
whole vertebrate fish entombed in a modern deposit is surely 
a unique occurrence. But every geologist knows that the 
remains of fishes are, in countless millions of cases, found 
in an excellent state of preservation. They are literally 
entombed in whole shoals, with the beds containing them 
miles on miles in extent, and scattered over every portion 
of the globe. 

Thus Buckland, in speaking of the fossils of Monte Bolca, 
which are quite typical of other cases, says: — 

The skeletons of these fish he parallel to the laminae of 
the strata of the calcareous slate; they are always entire, 
and so closely packed on one another that many individuals 
are often contained in a single block. . . . All these fish 
must have died suddenly on this fatal spot, and have been 
speedily buried in the calcareous sediment then in the course 
of deposition. From the fact that certain individuals have 
even preserved traces of color upon their skin, we are cer- 
tain that they were entombed before decomposition of their 
soft parts had taken place. — " Geology and Mineralogy,*' 
Vol /, pages 124, 125, edition 1858. 

In hundreds of cases shales and slates are so full of 
fish-oil that they will burn almost like coal, while some 
geologists claim that some deposits of cannel-coal were 
formed by the distillation of this fish-oil from the super- 
saturated mass. 

There is a series of strata found in all parts of the world, 
which used to be called the " old red sandstone," and is now 
known as the Devonian. In these beds, almost wherever we 
find them, the remains of fishes occur in such profusion and 
preservation that the " period " is often known as the " Age 



154 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



of Fishes." Dr. David Page, after enumerating nearly 
a dozen genera, says: — 

These fishes seem to have thronged the waters of the 
period, and their remains are often found in masses, as if 




GANOID FISHES FROM THE DEVONIAN ROCKS 

they had been suddenly entombed in Hving shoals by the 
sediment which now contains them. 

Hugh Miller's classic description of these rocks as they 
occur in Scotland may be taken as representative of nu- 
merous other Devonian rocks in all parts of the world: — 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 155 

We read in the stone ... a wonderful record of vio- 
lent death falling at once, not on a few individuals, but 
on whole tribes. . . . 

At this period of our history, some terrible catastrophe 
involved in sudden destruction the fish of an area at least 
a hundred miles from boundary to boundary, perhaps much 




A reptile (Pterodactylus crassirostris) about a foot long, with 
about three feet spread of wing. It had a large brain, and as it 
probably lived on fruits and nuts, it is interesting from corre- 
sponding more nearly to the " serpent " in the garden of Eden 
than anything yet discovered. From the Jurassic of Europe. 
Other species of Pterodactyl were many times larger. 

more. The same platform in Orkney as at Cromarty is 
strewed thick with remains, which exhibit unequivocally the 
marks of violent death. The figures are contorted, con- 
tracted, curved; the tail in many instances is bent round to 
the head; the spines stick out; the fins are spread to the full, 
as in fish that die in convulsions. ... 

In this attitude nine tenths of the Pterichthes of the lower 
old red sandstone are to be found. — " Old Red Sandstone,'' 
pages 48, 221, 222. 



156 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 



The conditions indicated here are evidently those of deep 
water, with sediment falHng so rapidly through it from above 
as to literally bury these fish alive. But this author ex- 
presses his astonishment at the quiet conditions in the waters, 
indicated by the fineness of the sediment, and the perfect 
condition of the fossil remains, combined with the amazing 
extent of the catastrophe. 

In what could it have originated? By what quiet but 
potent agency of destruction were the innumerable existences 




A gigantic dragon-fly (Titanophasma fayoli), from the Car- 
boniferous rocks of France. It was about sixteen inches long. 

of an area perhaps ten thousand square miles in extent anni- 
hilated at once, and yet the medium in which they had 
lived left undisturbed by its operations? Conjecture lacks 
footing in grappling with the enigma, and expatiates in 
uncertainty over all the known phenomena of death. — Id. 

Surely Howorth is talking good science when he says 
that his masters Sedgwick and Murchison taught him — 

that no plainer witness is to be found of any physical fact 
than that nature has at times worked with enormous energy 
and rapidity, and that the rocky strata teem with evidence 
of violent and sudden dislocations on a great scale. — 
*' Nightmare,^^ preface, page 15. 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 157 

We have spoken only of the fishes, but what other class 
of the animal kingdom will not point us a similar lesson? 
Reptiles and amphibians, to say nothing of the larger mam- 
mals, are also found in countless myriads, packed together 
as if in natural graveyards. Everybody knows of the enor- 
mous numbers and splendid preservation of the great rep- 
tiles of the Western and Southern States, untombed by 
Leidy, Cope, and Marsh. One patch of Cretaceous strata 
in England, the Wealden, has afforded over thirty different 
species of Dinosaurs, Crocodiles, and Pleisosaurs. De la 
Beche, the first director of the Geological Survey of Great 
Britain, speaking of animal remains in general, though with 
especial reference to these gigantic monsters of the Meso- 
zoic rocks, says that — 

a very large proportion of them must have been entombed 
uninjured, and many alive, or, if not alive, at least before 
decomposition ensued. — " Theoretical Geolog}),'' page 265, 
1834. 

The Invertebrates also bear eloquent testimony to the fact 
of very abnormal conditions having prevailed when their 
remains were entombed. Whether we speak of insects or 
crustaceans, of mollusks, corals, or crinoids, it is the same 
old story of abnormal deposits, entirely different from any- 
thing that is being made to-day. 

Where, for instance, in the modern seas will we find the 
remains of coral polyps now being intercalated between beds 
of clays or sands over vast areas as we find them in the 
Lias and Oolyte of England and elsewhere? In some cases 
they are even between beds of conglomerate. Corals, though 
not living at very great depths, require clear, pure waters, 
and it would require an awful catastrophe to intercalate a 



158 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

bed of coral remains a few feet or a few inches in thickness 
over the vast areas that we find them. Crinoids require the 
same clear water, but much deeper, some of the modern 
kinds living over a mile down. But every student of the 
science knows that the subcarboniferous Hmestone of both 
Europe and America, so noted for its crinoids and corals, 
is constantly found intercalated between shales or sand- 
stones, or between the coal-beds themselves, as at Spring- 
field, Illinois, or in the lower coal measures of Westmore- 
land County, Pennsylvania. Surely no sane man will claim 
that these beds of crinoids or corals, perhaps only a few 
inches in thickness, grew in situ. In some tables given by 
Dana ("Manual," pages 651, 652), compiled from four 
different localities, we count no fewer than twenty-three 
beds of limestone thus interbedded with sand, shale, or coal. 
Similar combinations of beds are not now forming anywhere 
on earth in modern deposits, and have not been within the 
historic period. 

We have not space to speak of the fossil bivalves, whose 
valves are quite often found applied, as if buried alive, before 
the shells had time to open; or of the hosts of brachiopods, 
usually found with the valves closed, and the interior often 
hollow, showing that no mud had had time to work through 
the hole near the hinge- joint which always exists after the 
animal dies. These telltale conditions should be to us what 
a bullet hole found in the skull, or arsenic in the stomach, 
of a subject of a post mortem ought to be to those holding 
an inquest. The plants in the coal-beds tell the same story. 
The mummies of the mammoth, in northern Siberia, also 
attest a thoroughly abnormal condition of affairs, not simply 
by their encasing in the frozen soil undecomposed, but also 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 159 

by their incredible abundance, for " the soil of certain por- 
tions of the tundras seems to be almost crammed with such 
remains." (R. Lydekker, Smithsonian Report, 1899, pages 
361-366.) 

But whither shall we turn to avoid finding similar phe- 
nomena? The vast deposits of mammals in the Rocky 
Mountains unearthed of late years may occur to the reader. 
As Dana says, these places " have been found to be literally 
Tertiary burial-grounds." We need not attempt the de- 
tails of these, nor of those other deposits in Europe where 
the great Tertiary mammals have been found mixed up with 
human remains, for we would only weary the reader with 
a monotony of abnormal conditions of deposit, unlike any- 
thing now being produced this wide world over. We shall 
be stating the case very mildly indeed if we conclude that 
the vast majority of all the fossils, by their profuse abun- 
dance and their astonishing preservation, tell their own story 
of " speedy burial after death," or before, and are entirely 
different in character from those now being laid down along 
our coasts and by our rivers and lakes. 

In this post mortem on the fossils of the rocks, we can 
not do otherwise than render the verdict of death by vio- 
lence; and the Biblical deluge alone is adequate to explain 
the facts in the case. Our modern scientific knowledge 
simply confirms the record in Genesis of a marvelously 
beautiful world wiped out of existence and buried by a 
violent cataclysm. 



160 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 






^^9^fJ;A?(^k^ 







PROF. EDUARD SUESS (1831- ) 

Professor in the University of Vienna 

One of the foremost living geologists. He thinks that the old 
notion of a " pulsating crust," with the land continually on the 
go, up and down, here and there, is a great error ; and one of his 
chief contributions to modern science has been in showing that we 
have nothing now going on in our modern world like the great 
exchange of land and water recorded in the rocks. If geologists 
could only understand this great fact, it means the logical bank- 
ruptcy of the Uniformitarianism of Lyell and Hutton. 



CHAPTER X 

The Verdict 

IN the preceding chapter we devoted considerable attention 
to the packed graveyards found in every corner of the 
globe, full of the strange forms from that olden world which 
were buried by sea water where now are wide-spread 
plains or mountain ranges. The really multitudinous argu- 
ments against the popular theories suggested by these condi- 
tions we have not the space to catalogue, much less develop 
in detail. But even these strangely abnormal deposits are 
not in themselves and considered singly the most conclusive 
proofs that our world has witnessed an awful aqueous catas- 
trophe — the scientific complement of the Biblical deluge. 
The absolutely unanswerable argument in this behalf can 
only be understood by rising to that high and general view 
of the matter which takes in the whole world's surface, and 
the whole field of geological facts. 

The broad general fact is that the remains of man, and 
thousands of living species of plants and animals, are found 
in stratified rocks, spread out by flowing water, often sea 
water; but the place of these deposits, now high and dry, 
it may be thousands of feet above the sea-level, has not 
been occupied by the sea since the dawn of scientific obser- 
vation. Land and sea have at some time been all mixed 
up together, or have exchanged places. And, according to 
the best authorities of the day, such as Zittel, Fuchs, and 
Suess,^ nothing in the nature of a gradual tendency to- 

1 See chapter 12 of the author's " lUosfical Geology." 

" (161) 



162 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

ward such a mutual exchange of land and water, is now 
going on anywhere on earth. Hence we have no natural 
way to account for this exchange of land and water, except 
by saying that something happened to our world long ago, 
before the dawn of recorded history, which was thoroughly 
different in kind as well as in degree from anything now 
going on. 

It is not necessary for us to discuss here the questions 
relating to the antiquity of man, as it is popularly under- 
stood. The question of how far back in geological time 
man actually lived is for us, who have discarded the myth 
of the successive geological ages, wholly a false way of 
looking at the subject. Why should we attempt to decide 
whether Pliocene or Miocene or Eocene shells are found 
with these fossil human remains? 

That man lived in Western Europe contemporary with 
those giants of that older world, the elephant and the musk- 
ox, the rhinoceros and the reindeer, the lion, the cape hyena, 
and the hippopotamus, at a time when most of our mountains 
had no existence, but their places were occupied by great 
stretches of ocean, while a soft, vernal climate mantled all 
the northern regions and clear within the arctic circle, are 
truths which all admit. Such facts are now found in the 
text-books for our children in the public schools. 

The really important fact is that human remains are 
found fossil, just the same as other forms of life, and that 
there is absolutely no way of proving that these fossil men 
are not as old as any other fossils. Whatever proves the 
latter old does the same for the former; but if we insist on 
the comparatively modern character of these fossil human 
rerrains, we must admit the same for all other fossils, be- 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 163 

cause, as already shown, inductive science insists that the fos- 
sil ivorld Tvas a unit, and that man Tvas contemporary with 
all alike. True science can never take us back of this state 
when all existed contemporaneously together; for it would 
require a supernatural knowledge of the past to discriminate 
among the fossils, and say that any particular group existed 
before the others, and occupied the world exclusively for 
ages before the others came into existence. As we have 
seen, all efforts to thus lay out a history of organic creation 
have ended in a miserable failure, because such efforts are 
along lines so false that they are rapidly making geology 
a laughing-stock to the other sciences founded on the prin- 
ciples of Bacon and Newton. The fossil world is a unit, 
and simply represents the ruins of an older state of our 
present world; and whatever geological changes they indi- 
cate, must have taken place since man Tvas on the earth; 
for there is no possible line of scientific reasoning whatever 
to convince us that any single type of fossil is older than the 
human race. 

Even if we wish to consider the matter simply from the 
popular scientific standpoint, we have a formidable list of 
cosmic changes that geologists admit have taken place since 
'* middle Tertiary time," which is the period now usually 
given as the one containing the first human fossils. Here 
is the list of what the popular text-books teach has taken 
place since man was on the earth: — 

1 . Man must have seen the entire elevation or at least the 
completion of all the great mountain ranges of the world, 
such as the Rockies, Andes, Alps, Himalayas, etc. 

2. The relative distribution of land and water has — 
since man's existence as commonly stated — changed com- 



164 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

pletely. The land and water have practically changed 
places over the greater part of the globe. 

3. Man lived while the arctic regions had a mild, soft 
climate, and he lived to see these conditions so suddenly 
changed that some of his contemporary brute companions 
were caught in the waters and frozen so speedily that their 
flesh has remained untainted. Other considerations show 
that this change of climate affected the whole world. 

4. But contemporaneous with these physical changes there 
dropped out of sight on all the continents those huge beasts 
whose remains are now found buried in the stratified rocks, 
deposited by flowing water, and which, exhibited in the 
museums of every land, are the astonishment of all the world. 

Referring to the complete extinction from the American 
continent of the mammoth, rhinoceros, the mastodon, the 
great tiger, and thirty odd species of the horse tribe, with 
some others, a celebrated naturalist asks: — 

What then has exterminated so many species and whole 
genera? The mind at first is irresistibly hurried into the 
belief of some great catastrophe; but thus to destroy ani- 
mals, both large and small, in southern Patagonia, in Brazil, 
on the Cordillera of Peru, in North America, and up to 
Bering Straits, we must shake the entire framework of the 
globe. — Darwin, '* Voyage of the Beagle,'' pages 172-176. 

From the purely scientific standpoint, it may not be easy 
to understand how the world could so far have recovered 
from a universal and complete catastrophe of this nature. 
There may be difficulties here, from the simple standpoint 
of science, as to the extent and completeness of this event, 
i. e., as to how much of all the fossiliferous deposits were 
due to this event, and how much may have been laid down 
previously. It may be difficult to thus draw the line, and 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 165 

assign limits to this catastrophe and the work it did, but 
the main general fact is placed forever beyond question or 
cavil. 

In view of the perfect collapse of the theory of succes- 
sive ages, in view of the fact that modern living species are 
found fossil in all the rocks, of the amazing change in cli- 
mate which the earth has experienced, of the dwindling of 
all forms of life and the extinction of thousands of genera, 
and in view of the crowded graveyards in which we find 
their remains, it seems almost like a deliberate insult to our 



// it shall turn out that Moses kneiv more about 
geology than Humboldt, . . . then I will admit 
that infidelity must become speechless forever. — 
Robert Ingersoll, " Tilt with Talmage." 



intellectual honesty to be approached with offers to explain 
these things on any so-called natural action of the forces 
of nature. It is now as certain as any other common scien- 
tific or historical fact, as certain as the fall of Rome, the 
burning of Moscow, or the earthquake of Lisbon, that our 
once magnificently stocked and climated world was des- 
troyed by some sudden and awful cataclysm. With this 
an assured fact, it is not difficult for the Christian to go a 
step farther, and say that it must have been just as complete 
a destruction, brought about by the same means, and re- 
covered from in just the same manner, as pictured in the 
book of Genesis. So, with renewed courage and faith, we 
turn again to this dear old Book, which has told the one 
consistent story all these centuries. Thus, with the succes- 



166 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




DR. LYMAN ABBOTT (1835- ) 
Editor of the Outlook, and a leader of the New Theology in America 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 167 

sion-of-life idea consigned to the limbo of all other crude 
guesses, with all the fogs of pseudo-science clearing away, 
the human mind to-day, as never before within historic time, 
stands face to face with that most awful yet sublime fact, 
a literal creation, the immediate act of the Infinite God. 

The saddest thing about the whole situation as it now 
stands is the sorry picture presented by those individuals 
— I had almost said whole churches or denominations — 
who for twoscore years or so have been vying with each 
other in repudiating the Mosaic record, and in their frantic 
haste to reconstruct the whole Christian system in accord- 
ance with the Evolution doctrine. No picture, in all the 
dreary ages of incessant efforts made by each generation to 
evade the claims of their pitying Creator and Redeemer, 
can equal this of the learned, cultured, modern church, so 
eager to believe a lie concerning her Lord, so quick to write 
her own bill of divorcement. 

Now, with the tide already turned, with the fossil wit- 
nesses already crowding together like a very theater crush 
in testimony to the truth of the Biblical record, will the 
church retrace her steps? Will she retract her fulsome 
flatteries heaped upon those reckless scientific speculators 
who for a half century or so have been pronounced little 
less than demigods? Will she endeavor to extricate her- 
self from the stultifying position she now occupies? Alas! 
the probabilities are all the other way. The analogy of 
history is against such a hope. Scientists and naturalists 
may be depended upon to recognize the truth concerning 
a literal creation far more quickly than those professed ex- 
ponents of the Christian religion who have talked so glibly 
about " Theistic Evolution " and the " New Theology." 



CHAPTER XI 

Creation as Taught in the Two Books 

IT was one of the sneers of Macc^ulay that natural theology 
is not a progressive science. Natural theology may be 
defined as the knowledge of the being and character of 
God which we can gather from reason and nature alone, 
without the help of revelation. Strangely enough, this bril- 
liant but often superficial essayist claimed that the early 
Greek philosophers had the same evidences of design in 
creation, and were as favorably situated to decide the great 
problems of origin and destiny, and to judge of the char- 
acter of God from his works, as are the people of our day. 
It will be our aim in this chapter to draw some conclusions 
from the facts given on the preceding pages to show how 
these modern discoveries from the one book confirm the 
record of a literal creation given in the other, and thus 
indirectly answer the claim of Macaulay that the ancient 
Greeks had as much light on this point as we have. 

There are other proofs of the inspiration of the Bible and 
of the character of God much stronger than any evidence 
that can be gathered from the material world. The strong- 
est proof of Christianity, and thus also of the inspiration of 
the text-book of Christianity, is a loving and lovable Chris- 
tian. " Ye shall know them by their fruits," said the Great 
Teacher of this religion. Perhaps the next strongest evi- 
dence in this direction is seen by comparing what Christianity 
has done for peoples and nations with what its rejection has 
brought upon others. Especially when this subject is con- 
(1G8) 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 169 

sidered in the light of prophecy, does it become an unan- 
swerable and overwhelming argument for the truth of the 
religion which we love, and for the revelation upon which 
it is based. But all these are beyond the scope of this 
chapter. The countless evidences of design in nature, thus 
proving a Divine Mind back of them all, have been often 
set forth, and are somewhat aside from our subject. In 
the preceding pages we have justified the record of the 
flood as told in the two books; here we shall carry the vin- 
dication, the proof of mutual harmony, back to the record 
of an immediate creation. 

There are several prophecies which point to a great in- 
crease of light in the last days regarding this subject of 
creation. One of these is in Rev. 14: 7, where a great 
world-wide proclamation, going " to every nation, and kin- 
dred, and tongue, and people," calls upon all men to " wor- 
ship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the 
fountains of waters." Doubtless, as has been pointed out 
many times by others, this prophecy foretells a great reform 
on the Sabbath, which is the special memorial of creation, 
and the sign of allegiance on the part of God's people to- 
ward him as their Creator. And how peculiarly appropriate 
is this message when considered as addressed to this age 
of Evolutionists! Who can doubt that the many discov- 
eries, in which our modern age has had the wondrous works 
of creation opened up before them, have been permitted 
largely to help us to appreciate what creation means, and 
thus to appreciate the appropriateness of the divine me- 
morial of this event? How appropriate that God*s people 
should make use of these discoveries to call a careless and 
skeptical world back to the worship of him whom they have 



170 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

largely forgotten or ignored, in spite of these astonishing 
evidences multiplying on every hand! 

From many other prophecies which have often been dis- 
cussed, we know that the crowning test of the ages turns 
upon this very question of our relationship to the Creator, 
and his relationship to us. Hence, is it not reasonable to 
expect that the Creator would, for this last generation, 
greatly strengthen the argument for a literal creation, which 



The Sabbath-rest was a Babylonian, as well 
as a HebreTv institution. Its origin went back io 
pre-Semitic da^^s, and the verij name. Sabbath, 
b}^ which it was known in Hebrew, was of Baby- 
lonian origin. In the cuneiform tablets the " Sab- 
attu " is described as " a da]) of rest for the soul.'' 
— A. H. Sayce, in " The ' Higher Criti- 
cism ' AND THE Verdict of the Monu- 
ments," PAGE 74. 



may be read from the works of his hands? Of course 
his written Word testifies of a literal, direct creation; but 
many modern people do not believe this written Word, 
while they do profess to believe in the teachings of nature. 
Hence, might we not expect that before the climax of the 
ages God would give almost a scientific demonstration of this 
all-important fact of a literal creation? To leave the world 
absolutely without excuse, would not God be under obli- 
gation (we speak it reverently) to give such an argument 
after the scientists' own favorite kind as would convince 
them of this grand event, and of their obligation to him on 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 171 

that account, the Sabbath being the appropriate sign, or 
seal, of his authority and of this relationship? 

It seems almost self-evident that the great scientific dis- 
coveries of the present age have been timed and planned 
largely for the purpose of working out just such a demon- 
stration of a literal creation before the eyes of this generation 
of Evolutionists. And how appropriate it is that the gospel 
for this time should be given in such a setting as this! 
Ho\y timely is such a message as this of Rev. 14:7, when 
addressed to the scientists of this age, who have for nearly 



This Sabbath of the Babylonians, thus proved to 
have been ki^own centuries before the time of 
Moses, is evidently onl^ another relic handed down 
from Eden. 



half a century pointed their jokes at the " nursery yarns " 
of Genesis, and have claimed that they could easily explain 
the origin of the world and of everything in it by purely 
natural law. Now that their hopeless failure to do this be- 
comes more strikingly evident with each passing year, why 
should not the people of God gather fresh courage for their 
Master's work, and use these modern discoveries as proofs, 
not only of their Creator's power and wisdom in creating 
all things in the beginning, but as promises of that glorious 
world which his love will re-create for us, when there shall 
be no more tears, ** neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall 
there be any more pain; for the former things are passed 
away ? 



172 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

What do we mean by creation? and what would serve 
as proofs of there having been a real creation, such as the 
Bible records? Omitting the subject of absolute creation, 
that is, the creation of the materials of which our world is 
composed, and restricting our study to the creation of plant 
and animal life, we may sum up the matter by giving as the 
teaching of the Bible the general truth that creation was 
completed at some definite time in the past, that " the works 
were finished from the foundation of the world " (Heb. 
4:3), and thus that the work of creation is not now go- 
ing on. 

During the past century or so, as we have seen, there has 
been a constant effort on the part of science to explain cre- 
ation as only similar to things now going on around us, as 
only one in kind with the action of natural law in the world 
to-day. Hence, though we may not be able to show the 
exact process of creation, we may take it as constituting un- 
deniable proof of creation, in the Biblical sense, if we can 
show that in many various ways nature furnishes us proofs 
that the origin of things must have been radically different, 
not merely in degree, but in kind, from anything going on 
to-day in the world around us. 

The ancients did not see anything very wonderful in the 
thought of creation as the work of some omnipotent Being, 
some omniscient Mind, nor did they know enough of the 
alphabet of nature to be able to decipher the record of cre- 
ation which God has written in the dewdrops and in the 
orbs of the sky, in flower, shrub, and tree, and especially in 
man, who, revelation declares, was made in the likeness of 
his Creator. The telescopic wonders in the worlds above, 
the microscopic and chemical revelations from the world in 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 173 

which we move and of which we are a part, become only 
so many thousands of ways in which we moderns are in ad- 
vance of the ancient Greeks in a knowledge of the works of 
God, and by reason of which we can appreciate a thousand- 
fold more than did they the evidence thus furnished of 
the Creator's wisdom and power. They believed in the 
four elements, — earth, air, fire, and water, — and thought 
that frogs and mosquitoes and many other forms of life 
sprang up spontaneously from the moist earth. No wonder 
they saw nothing in creation very different from what was 
going on around them. How extravagant, then, for any 
one to say that they were as favorably situated as we for 
understanding the works and appreciating the character of 
the Creator! 

Century after century dragged its slow length along, until 
it really seemed that the world would never awake to an 
understanding of God's great book of nature. Spontaneous 
generation continued to be taught and believed in until well 
along in the nineteenth century. Not until the time of the 
pious Pasteur, who said that he always prayed when about 
his work in the laboratory, was it settled once for all that 
life can not arise from the not living except by direct crea- 
tion. Life comes now only from antecedent life. And the 
same law holds good in the spiritual realm. This was 
Christ's word to Nicodemus: " Ye must be born from 
above." We are Hke the dead, inorganic matter all around 
us. We have no real life in ourselves; and only by life 
coming down and taking possession of us and imparting its 
life to us can we truly live. We are just as helpless to 
evolve spiritual life in and of ourselves as is the clod of the 
valley unable to produce life by chemical and physical ac- 



174 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 




LOUIS PASTEUR 

His great work was in disproving the doctrine of spontaneous 
generation, and in demonstrating that life can come only from 
antecedent life. 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 175 

tion alone. Science to-day acknowledges that life can come 
from the not living only by a direct creation, and thus 
vindicates the Biblical record, which says that Hfe came into 
existence on our world at the express command of God. 
But long before this much of a vindication of Genesis 
had been worked out, the spirit of evil had laid the foun- 
dation for a more subtle deception than any that he had 
yet sprung upon the world. Early in the nineteenth cen- 
tury, or even before, he began to teach that life had been 
on the globe for countless ages, that it began with the very 



Posterity will one da}) laugh at the foolishness 
of the modern materialistic philosophers. The 
more I stud)) nature, the more I stand amazed at 
the works of the Creator, I pray while I am 
engaged in my work at the laboratory. — Pasteur. 



lowest forms of life, and, gradually, in some way or an- 
other, new and higher forms of life came in to replace the 
old, until the higher forms were reached, and finally man, 
the flower and fruitage of this long-continued growth or 
development, came into existence. At first it was said that 
each successive form of life was due to a new and separate 
creation. Then, as this began to seem absurd, what was 
more natural than to claim that the higher forms developed 
naturally out of the lower preceding ones? 

It was supposed that geology had proved that there had 
actually been this succession of life on the globe, and that 
all the geological changes took place in the past by simple, 
every-day changes, like those now going on around us. 



176 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

Why not say that the origin of the higher species from the 
lower must have taken place in the same natural, common- 
place way, by forces and processes now in operation? So 
Charles Darwin volunteered to show how this development 
of species into other species is now going on; and the world 
clapped its hands in applause, and decided that creation 
is only a figure of speech, and the record of Genesis at the 
most only a beautiful myth or an allegory. Strangely 
enough, it was the last point in this argument that was the 
first to be refuted by science. Darwinism was found to be 
a huge mistake by its very friends who were searching for 
evidence in its favor. As we have seen, they could not 
find a single instance where species are now originating from 
other species. The world was ransacked in the frantic 
search; but to-day it is only the simple truth to say that 
most scientists have got tired of looking for success in such 
an effort. 

In the meantime, as we have also shown, the geologists 
had been at work uncovering some of the Lord's buried 
witnesses. These testified to conditions of death and burial 
wholly different in kind and degree from anything now 
going on. Then, to put the climax on it all, it was dis- 
covered that this whole succession of life itself was only a 
huge blunder, founded on a long series of disgraceful mis- 
takes; until it is now evident that there is absolutely no way 
of proving that one kind of fossil is older than another or 
than man himself. The inevitable conclusion follows that 
what geology has been fooling with all these years is only 
the ruins of that ancient antediluvian world which was des- 
troyed for its wickedness by the flood, as recorded in the 
seventh and eighth chapters of Genesis. And back of it all, 



GOD'S TWO BOOKS 177 

looming up against the dawn as the mists of Evolution and 
pseudo-science clear away, appears that most august thought 
of the human mind, now demonstrated as the very climax 
of scientific discovery, " In the beginning God created the 
heaven and the earth." 

Let us summarize the situation. Everybody knows how 
completely it is demonstrated that life can come only from 
antecedent life. The spontaneous generationists have prac- 
tically given up the fight. But not all are equally aware 
that the Darwinists are in about the same fix. Not a single 
example has ever been proved of one species having produced 
another distinct species. In addition, we have the recent dem- 
onstration that the popular geological ages are a hoax, being 
founded on a long series of gross blunders; and this demon- 
stration has been welcomed and acknowledged by most men 
who have had a chance to look into the matter. But if 
a true or inductive system of geology removes every possible 
scheme of Evolution, and makes it childish nonsense in the 
eyes of every one capable of appreciating evidence, it also 
in the very nature of things, proves the reality of the deluge, 
and thus not only strengthens faith in the Bible in general, 
but practically demonstrates the reality of a literal creation 
at some one definite time in the past. For if life demands 
a real creation, if each separate species demands a real cre- 
ation, and if no one species can be proved to be older than 
another, then why is not a literal creation of all the forms 
of life at approximately one time demonstrated as a scien- 
tific fact for every one capable of logical reasoning? 

There is no way of mistaking the meaning of all this, no 
way of failing to see why the Creator has allowed all these 
discoveries to accumulate in our day, why he has reserved 



178 GOD'S TWO BOOKS 

such demonstrative evidence of his creation to arm his rem- 
nant church with tangible facts of the world's own favorite 
kind, as she goes out to proclaim the memorial of this cre- 
ation to this scoffing age of Evolutionists, promising that 
soon her absent Lord will return to destroy by fire even 
this ruin of a world, and from it to re-create a new earth, 
wherein will dwell righteousness and peace forevermore. 
This is the situation now before our world. A century 
of scientific research has taught our age to appreciate, as no 
other age could have done, the force of the evidence urged 
upon us by thousands of discoveries, that creation was wholly 
different from anything now going on about us. And who, 
as we, can appreciate the beauty and appropriateness of 
God's memorial of this event, the memorial also of our 
re-creation, or redemption through Christ, and a promise of 
the new heavens and the new earth, where " from one 
Sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before 
me, saith the Lord **? Isa. 66: 23. 



INDEX 



The numbers refer to the pages, A * indicates a portrait 
or other illustration. 

A 
Abbott, Lyman, 22, * 166 
Agassiz, Louis, 73, * 76 
Age of rocks, how told, 69-73 
Ages of geology, 19, 21, 23, * 81, 86, 87 
Agnosticism, 22 
Alchemy, 17 

Archaean rocks, 103, 106 
Archeology, 39-54 

Arctic regions, their former mild climate, 51, 124, 142 
Argyll, Duke of, 47, 49 
Aristotle, 15, 17 
Assyria, 40 
Aztecs, 42 

B 
Babel, 40, 52, 53 
Babylonia, 40, 41, 45 
Bad Lands, * 102 
Ball, William Piatt, 62 
Biogenetic theory, 77, 78 
Bison, 57 

" Blackwood's Magazine," 45 
Bonney, T. G., 97 
Borsippa, 53 
Buckland, William, 153 
Buffon, Count de, 19, *ioo, loi 

C 

Cahokia, mound of, 44 

Campbell, R. J., * 13 

Catastrophism, 72, 73 (note) 

Central America, 41 

Chaldean deluge tablets, * 41, 53 

" Challenger " Expedition, 145, 150 

Chamberlain and Salisbury, 113 

Change of climate, 124, 141, 142 

Cheyne, T. K., 48, 49 (note) 

Church federation, see Federal Council of Churches 

Climate before the flood, 51, 124, 142 

Coral, fossil, * 126 

Conformability, 108 

Coroner, methods of, 95, 96 

(179) 



180 INDEX 

Cosmogonies, 17 

Creation, proofs of, 168-178 

Crinoids, * 143, * 144, * 145, * 146 

Cromlechs, 43 

Ctenoid, * 152 

Cuvier, Baron, 19, 65, 71, * 72, 103, 127, 130 

D 

Darwin, Charles, * 18, 19, 21, 62, 164, 176 

Darwinism, 19 (note), 55-75 

Dana, James D., 65, 106, 107, 108, 113, * 138, 142, 150, 152 

Dawson, Sir William, 23, 24, 63, 82 (note) 

" Deferents," 17 

Definitions of geological terms, 78-87 

Degeneration, 143 

De la Beche, H. T., 157 

Delitzsch, Frederick, 41 

Deluge, 41, 42, 43, 51, 93, 159, 161-165 

Deluge tablets, *4i, 53 

Dennert, E., 61 (note), 66 (note) 

De Vries, Hugo, 63, 64 (note), 143 

Dinosaurs, * 140, * 141 

Diprotodon, * 141 

Dolmens, 43 

Donnelly, Ignatius, 47, 52 

E 

Egypt, 40-42, 45-47 

Environment, 61, 62 

" Epicycles," 17 

Eucalyptus, * 137 

Evil, origin of, 27-30 

Evolution, its present popularity, 14 

F 

Federal Council of Churches, 37 

Ferns, '■'• 147 

Fiske, John, 40 

Flood, see Deluge 

Folding of rocks, 84; see also Reversed condition of strata 

Formation, definition, 86 

G 
Galileo, * 16 
Ganoids, * 149, * 154 
Geikie, James, 51, 86 
Geikie, Sir Archibald, 80, 83, 85, * 114 
Gibbons, Cardinal, * 34 



INDEX 181 



Gilbert, G. K., 82 (note) 

Goethe, J. W., 32 

Gorilla, * 64 

Greeks, speculations of, 14, 15 

H 

Haeckel, Ernst, 21, * 77 

Harnack, Adolf, * 12 

Hartmann, Eduard von, 63, 64 

Higher Criticism, 37, 46 

Howorth, Sir Henry H., 88, 123, 156 

Hutton, James, 65, * 92 

Huxley, T. H., * 20, 21, 22, 40, 55, 89 

I 

" Independent," 22, 23 
Ingersoll, Robert, 165 
Insects, * 148, * 156 

K 
Khammurabi, code of, 46 
Kepler, J., 17 

L 
Laing, Samuel, 52, 53 
Lamarckian factors, 62 
Lankester, E. Ray, 61, 130 
Le Conte, Joseph, 22, 28, 56, * 58 
Leibnitz, G. W., 19 
Lemur, * 132 
Lenormant, F., 54 
Liberty, imperiled, 32-38 
Lydekker, Richard, 159 
Lyell, Sir Charles, 19, 65, * 74 

M 
Macaulay, T. B., 168 
Mammals, living and extinct, 57 
Mammoth, * 123 
Mastodon, * 118 
Maury, Alfred, 42 
Mayas, 42 

McConnel, R. G., in 
Mexico, 40, 41 
Miller, Hugh, 24, 154, 155 
Mivart, St. George, 40 
Mollusks, * 139 

Moral aspects of the Evolution theory, 26-38 
Morgan, T. H., 64 (note) 



182 INDEX 

Mosaic age, the, 45, 46 
Muller, Max, 47 
Murchison, Roderick, 156 

N 

" Natural Selection," 19 (note), 56, 62, 63, 65, 67 

" Nature," 61 (note), 63, 84, 113, 116 

Nebuchadnezzar, 53 

Nebular hypothesis, 19, 97 

New Theology, 14, 167 

New Thought, 9 

Newton, Sir Isaac, 17, * 90, 123, 124 

Niagara, 82 

Nicholson, H. A., no 

Niebuhr, B. G., 53 

Nordenskiold, N. A. E., 139, 151 

Nummulites, * 149 

O 
Ocean bottom, 150 
Onion-coat theory, 69, 71, 103 
Origin of evil, 27-30 
Origin of false religions, 11 
Origin of species, 21 
Owen, Sir Richard, 130 

P 
Page, David, 121, 154 
Pasteur, Louis, 173, * 174, 175 
Peace Congress, 33 
Peru, 40, 42 

Pictures on the cave walls, 42 
" Platicnemism," 43 
Plato, 15 

" Popular Science Monthly," 151 
Pterodactyl, * 155 

Ptolemaic astronomy, 15, 16 (note), 17 
Pyramids, 44 

Quietistic theory, 19, 21, 93-96 

R 

Renan, Ernest, 46 

Reversed condition of fossils, 110-116, * 112, *ii5 

Rocks in the wrong order, * 112 

Roman Catholic Church, 35, 37 

Romanes, G. J., 40 

S 
Sabbath, 169, 178 
Sayce, A. H., 11, 45, * 48, 170 



INDEX 183 



Sedgwick, Adam, 156 

Sequoia, * 137 

Shark, * 149 

Schenk, August, 129 

Skipping, 133 • 

Smith, William, 19, 65, * 70, 103 

Social aspects of the Evolution theory, 26-38 

Socialism, 32-35 

Species defined, 55, 56, 127 

Spencer, Herbert, 21, 62, * 66, 89, 105 

Sphinx, 44 

Stonehenge, 44 

Succession of life theory, 99, 106, 116, 118, 175 

Suess, Eduard, * 160 

T 
Tel el-Amarna tablets, 46 
Teocallis, 44 

Theistic Evolution, 14, 22, 167 
Theosophy, 9 
"Thrust-faults," 110-116 
Titanotherium, * 104 
Trilobites, * 120 
Tyndall, John, 21 

U 

Uniformitarianism, 75 (note), 93-96, 160 (note) 

Upturned strata, * 84 

Use and disuse, effects of, 61, 62 

V 

Variation, 65, 67, 143 

Vedas, religion of, 47 

Vindication of the Bible, 24, 25, 167, 175, 177, 178 

Virchow, Rudolf, 55 

W 
Wallace, A. R., 61, 130 
Weismann, August, * 60, 64 (note) 
Werner, A. G., * 68, 103 
Whewell, William, 89 

Y 
Yak, domestic, 56 
Yucatan, 41 

Z 

Zittel, Karl von, 106, * 128, 129-131, 149 



Works by the Same Author 



Outlines of Modern Science and Modern Christianity 
Cloth, 271 pages, 1 902 - 75 Cents 



Illogical Geology, the ^Y^akest Point in the 
Evolution Theory 

Paper, 93 pages, 1906 - 25 cents 

(A Revised and Enlarcted Edition Is in Preparation) 

CRITICAL OPINIONS 

" I have been intensely interested in your ' Illogical Geology, ' and I think 
you prove your points conclusively. " 

Rev. S. Baring-Gould, 

Lew Trenchard, England. 
Autlior of "Curious Myths of the Middle r^lg-es. " 

" It is a very clever book. " 

David Starr Jordan, 
President of Leland Stanford University. 

" I do not see why the argument is not scientific and demonstrative. It 
seems to me that you have demonstrated the hopelessly unscientific char- 
acter of the hitherto-accepted geological notions. " 

Prof. William Cleaver Wilkinson, 

University of Chicago 

" Many thanks for your book which I have read with much interest. . . . 
Sir H. Howorth's arguments from the presence of herds of mammoths, etc., 
in places where they must have been overwhelmed by a sudden catastrophe, 
have always seemed to me very strong and have never yet been answered by 
' orthodox ' geology. " Prof. A. H. Sayce, 

Oxford University, England 

" I think you have brought out with great clearness the difficulties of sup- 
porting the evolution theory from the geological side. " 

Prof. Geo. Howard Parker, 
Department of Zoology, Harvard University^ 

" It is a remarkable piece of logical reasoning. You are a cogent writer) 
and I am glad we have you on the side of ' primal orthodoxy. ' " 

Prof. Franklin Johnson, 

Uii'iversity of Chicago. 



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